


Hold Close the Universe

by Prevalent_Masters



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Olympics, Viktor has a crisis, Yakov has Had It with these children, but also so much fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-09-12 04:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9056008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prevalent_Masters/pseuds/Prevalent_Masters
Summary: With Viktor's triumphant return to skating comes the expectation of dominating the season, continuing his winning streak, and (hopefully) marrying Yuuri Katsuki.Unfortunately, fate has other plans, including crutches and crippling self doubt.  Fun.





	1. люблю́

**Author's Note:**

> Hey kids I'm trash now, here's a fic.
> 
> A little role reversal. I wanted to explore Viktor's more vulnerable side, and what it would take for him to feel some of Yuuri's characteristic anxiety and self-doubt.
> 
> The events in this story are based around the 2017-2018 figure skating season. GP finals in Nagoya, Japan; winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, etc.
> 
> Disclaimer: I know nothing about figure skating.

The ice is home.

He's had many homes, all part of him, stretching back through his childhood.  Moscow.  St. Petersburg.  Italy, briefly.  Hasetsu.  But there’s always been something about the ice, something more, a constant that remains no matter where his physical body is.  The chill, the rapid beat of his heart, the sound of his skates slicing the ice precisely.  Flying.  It will never change and it will always be the place that gives him the most comfort in the world.

Even in a crowd.  Even at a competition.  Even at the Grand Prix final.

Yuuri is different.  Yuuri finds comfort on the ice, but loses it under the pressure of competition.  Yuuri can’t fully divorce himself from his situation, can’t let the world drip off his shoulders until it’s just him, the ice, and flying.

Viktor’s been working with him on that.

Yuuri performed right before him.  He’d been beautiful.  Viktor can still see him, in his mind’s eye—his spins, an amazing quad salchow that he’d landed without blinking.  His body, sinuous and beautiful.  He’d _owned_ the ice.  He was giving Viktor a run for his money.  And Yurio.

But Viktor feels.  Viktor feels this performance. He’s never been so free, so confidant, so _part_ of the ice, of the routine, of anything.  The crowd melted away long ago—the cheers, the meaningless words of the announcers.  Yakov, Yurio, even Yuuri, hanging on the side of the rink, cheering—all faded into insignificant background noise.  Even his music.  It’s just him, the slice of his blades against the ice, and flying.

His final jump is a quadruple axel.  He’s taken a page out of Yuuri’s book at saved it for the end, relying on increased endurance, an extra spin, and sheer willpower to keep surprising the audience.

He launches himself into the air.

He hasn’t missed this jump in practice or competition for over two months, and he knows it looks amazing.  Gasps and cheers from the crowd filter in through his haze of focus. 

He’s so high, and still spinning.  The world hangs, stunned silent for a moment.  A quiet, wild laugh spills out of him.

This is freedom.  This is everything.  Cuddling with Makkachin, kissing Yuuri, eating Katsudon, walking by the sea, the snow in St. Petersburg, every triumph of a win, it’s all in this jump.  All contained in the sheer relief of flying again on the ice.

His angle is a bit off for landing, he can tell.  He tries to shift his position, but it’s too late.  He lands badly.

Which should be fine, he knows how to save a bad landing

But

It’s not like he can logically hear it.  There’s far too much noise, all suddenly assaulting him, and it’s far too small a sound for what it means.  But the feeling reverberates through his body, and he imagines he can hear the second it happens.

_Pop._

His knee buckles, and he has to catch himself with his hand brushing the ice.  His leg won’t hold his weight.  He transfers most of his weight to the other leg and skates on, switching what should have been butterfly to a lame toe loop, landing well on the leg that still holds him and launching himself into a spin as the music swells.  The crowd’s gasps echo in his ears.  He hasn’t messed up a jump at a major competition for over five years.

Only 20 more seconds.  15.  He crouches down.  He has to stretch his leg in front of him as he drops into a sit-spin.  It won’t straighten properly.  He thinks he might pass out from the pain, but forces it to obey him.  The spin is sloppy.

10 seconds.  He straightens.  His leg threatens to overbalance him.  He keeps it slightly bent, tip off the ice.

The music stops.  He stops.  Stabs the toe of the bad leg into the ice, raises his arms in his final flourish.  Cheers make it through the haze in his mind.

He holds the pose for maybe three seconds.

And then he collapses.

He doesn’t decide to break form.  His knee just buckles and there he is, cheek resting on the ice, head spinning, cold and hot at the same time and wondering if he’s about to throw up in front of all these people.  He tries to stand up, to move at all, but nothing’s really working well now, everything seems smothered by a strange haze of pain and numbness, so he decides to just stay where he is and focus on the not throwing up part.

The loud slice of skates against ice cuts through the haze of his mind.  There’s a _thud_ and there are hands, cautious at first, then shaking him gently, and a voice. 

He opens his eyes.  He hadn’t realized they’d closed.  There are knees in front of him.  He rolls his head back.  Yuuri.

“Viktor?  Viktor!  What happened?  Are you okay?”

Yuuri looks panicked, but then he always looks panicked about something.  There are other voices close by now, but he zeroes in on the gold glinting on Yuuri’s finger.  Yuuri.  Yuuri will fix whatever’s happened.

“Yuuri,” he says, and smiles up at him, at his beautiful eyes, his furrowed eyebrows, his chapped lips.

Then he turns his head and throws up, right on the ice and a bit on Yuuri’s pants.

And then—well, then he passes out.

* * *

 “…clear dislocation of some sort, look at the uneven line of the leg…”

He wakes up, and he’s off the ice but still at the rink, the sound of the crowds loud in his ears.  He must not have been out for long, but the skip in time makes him feel muddled and more confused than before.  The pleasant numbness from the ice is gone and now there’s just fire in his leg and an ice pick stabbing his head.

“…surgery, probably, have to wait and see…”

 _That_ word forces his eyes open.

Yakov and some guy with a first aid kit are leaning over him.  Neither looks happy.

“Oh, he’s awake,” says first aid kit guy in English.  “Don’t pass out again.  You have a concussion.”

All he can manage in reply is a groan.  He rolls his head, looking for Yuuri, but doesn’t see him anywhere.  Yakov stops him from further exploration with his hand.

“You got second _,_ _глупый_ ,” Yakov says gruffly, perhaps mistaking his roving eyes as desperation to see the scores.  A pit of disappointment opens up in his stomach.

“Who…gold?” he manages to whisper around the pain.

“Your idiot fiancée.”

A stab of furious pride worms its way through the disappointment.  He smiles and shuts his eyes again.

“ _Don’t_ fall asleep!  Jesus…”

A hand slaps his cheek.  He groans again.

“You heard him.  We’ll get you out of here soon.  Right now, talk to me.”

“Bad landing,” he mutters, forcing his eyes open.

Yakov snorts.  “I noticed.”

“I threw up?”

“Also noticed.”

“In front of everyone.”

“There were enough people out on the ice by then that most people probably didn’t see it happen.”

He sighs and closes his eyes again.  He just can’t keep them open.  The light and noise _hurts_.  “Knee popped.  Sprained again.”

Yakov doesn’t answer.  He forces his eyes open again.  “Yakov?”

Yakov no longer looks angry, just sad.  “Might be more than that this time, _мой мальчик_.”

He doesn’t want to think about what that statement implies, but fortunately first aid kit guy chooses that moment to do something to his leg and the onslaught of pain briefly short-circuits his brain.

When it gets back online, he can hear Yuuri again.  He sounds halfway between furious and panicked—not a good combination.  He opens his eyes and lifts a hand to find him, to offer comfort.

Yuuri sees his eyes open and leans down.  “Viktor?  Viktor, you idiot.”

He has a gold medal looped around his neck.

A medal that, with his movement, swings down to hit Viktor squarely in the face.  Pain reverberates through his skull like someone rang a bell and he groans again.

Yuuri curses and pulls off the medal, stuffing it in his pocket.

“You should…keep your medal on.  Proud.”  Why are words so hard to find?

“To hell with my medal,” Yuuri snaps.  “You should have told me!”  Yuuri leans very close to his face as he yells.  He isn’t quite sure what he did to deserve this.

“Tell you what?”

“That you have a fucking _bum knee_!”  Yuuri yells.  His face is turning red and his glasses are crooked and distantly Viktor notes that he’s very cute.

“You’re very cute,” he says, and reaches up to pat Yuuri’s cheek.

“The ambulance is here,” someone calls—it sounds like Mila.  “They can’t get a gurney through this mess.”

His pride abruptly returns.

“I don’t need a gurney,” he says.  “Just help me up.”

Yuuri’s face turns a shade of purple.  “You can’t walk, you absolute idiot.  You just destroyed your knee.”

“I _can_ ,” he insists, then tries to sit up only to find he can’t without a sudden, violent return of nausea.

“Don’t be mad, _дорогой,”_ he mutters as he reels backwards into Yuuri’s arms.  “I don’t understand.”

“Fuck,” Yuuri says from behind him, only now it sort of sounds like he’s crying.  “This is really bad, isn’t it?”

“Let’s get him to a hospital and hear what they have to say before we get fatalistic,” Yakov says gruffly. 

“I don’t need a hospital,” he says, and can actually feel Yuuri tense up behind him.  “Just a sprain.”

“Viktor,” Yuuri says, and his voice is abruptly calm and even, tinged with anger still but like he’s forcibly holding himself together.  “I know you’re scared and also stubborn, but please.  Shut up and let us help you.”

Scared?  He’s not scared.  His head just hurts.  He slumps into Yuuri.  “Okay?”

“You’ll be okay,” Yuuri whispers, pressing his lips against Viktor’s temple. 

Then things are a bit muddled and painful for awhile as they maneuver him, half dragging and half carrying, all while trying to keep his leg from being jostled too much.  It doesn’t really work.

He vaguely recalls being loaded into an ambulance and Yuuri yelling loudly at a paramedic about being allowed to accompany him to the hospital.  The ribbon from his medal trails out of his jacket pocket as he shouts and he still has his skates on, balancing on his guards in the asphalt parking lot, which is terribly impractical.  He’s not quite sure what anyone’s saying anymore; his capacity for understanding English is starting to desert him alongside all his other brain functions.  He turns to the paramedic occupied with immobilizing his leg. 

“Yuuri?” he asks him.  “I want him with me.”

“Family only,” the paramedic says.  “You should relax.  We’ll be at the hospital soon.”

Yakov pushes himself onto the ambulance.  “I know his medical history,” he offers.  The paramedic rolls his eyes and shouts to his partner.  “The coach knows his medical history, we’ll take him.  Let’s get going.  You can follow,” he addresses Yuuri and Mila.  “We’re headed to Nagoya General.”

“But—“ Yuuri starts to protest.  The doors shut.

“We’re going to give you something for the pain, okay?” the paramedic leans over him.  “Just relax.  We’re going to get you sorted soon.”

The last thing he hears before he goes out again is Yakov explaining his history of knee sprains to the paramedics. 

* * *

He wakes muddled and groggy, to low light and less pain.  His headache has dulled to a low background throb and he can barely feel his leg.

Someone touches his shoulder.

“Are you awake?  Viktor?”

He pries his eyelids open.  Yakov swims into view.

“I—what?”  His voice cracks painfully and he coughs.  Yakov hands him a plastic cup of water and he drinks gingerly through the straw.

“I can’t feel my leg.”

“You had to have surgery.  Your knee is dislocated.  It tore an artery, and they had to stop the bleeding.  But…Viktor.”  Yakov pauses.

Viktor feels a slow bleed of cold premonition drip through his body, down to his stomach where it settles and builds into a pit of dread.  He doesn’t want to hear what Yakov says.  He already knows, but he can’t hear the words spoken out loud.

“Yuuri,” he interrupts desperately.   “Where is he?”

“He’s here,” Yakov says gently.  Viktor has never heard Yakov speak gently in his entire life.  “He just stepped out to make a call.”

“Please let me see him,” he’s ashamed to hear his voice crack around the words.  He can’t cry.  He won’t.  He doesn’t have anything to cry about.  “Please.”

Yakov bites his lip and steps out of the room.  He hears the whispers of a hurried conversation, and then Yuuri appears, dashing towards Viktor like they’ve been separated for days.

“Viktor,” he says, and grabs his hand.

“I can’t feel my leg,” he whispers again, clutching at Yuuri.  “I can’t feel it.”

Yuuri looks stricken for a moment, then drops down into a crouch so his head is level with Viktor’s.  He smiles, and it seems real, though tired.  “You haven’t lost a leg, if that’s what you’re worried about, you drama queen.  Your knee is a mess, though.  They’ve got you on all sorts of painkillers, which you should be happy about.  They have to drain all the fluids and blood out of it until they can get you back in to fix it.”

He swallows, throat still dry.

“Yuuri…is it…will I—it’s not just a sprain?”

“No,” Yuuri whispers.  “No, love.”

“Will I be—“ he can’t finish.  His voice breaks. 

“They won’t know until they can get in there and fix you up, okay?  You need to have surgery, to repair the tendons and make sure the joint doesn’t slip out of place again.”

“When?”

“As soon as they can get you in with a good surgeon.  Thankfully, we’re at one of the top research hospitals in Japan.  They have experts, apparently.”

“But—“

“Viktor,” Yuuri interrupts, stern.  It’s his order-Viktor-around voice, which he uses to great effect in bed and with middling success when he’s trying to get Viktor up in the mornings.  Viktor stops trying to talk.

“Don’t worry yet, okay?  We’ll figure it out.”  He presses a soft kiss to the back of Viktor’s hand.

Normally, he would argue.  Normally he would demand a full prognosis from at least three specialists, force them to show him his knee, x-rays and all, demand accurate estimates of rehab time, and force them to fly in his physical therapist from St. Petersburg before anything else happens.

But he’s tired and muddled and he wants to listen to Yuuri and believe the words he knows are empty, so he lets his eyes close and drifts until the doctors come back. 

* * *

Yuuri leaves him.  He walks away in a thousand different situations, always with the same aloof sneer thrown over his shoulder.  _You’re nothing,_ he tells him _you’re nothing to me if you can’t do what you’re meant to.  If you can’t coach me._ _If you can't skate._   He relives that day after the final again and again, except this time he has no legs, he’s lying on the floor of the Sochi rink and Yuuri shakes his head and shoots him a look of pity before he walks away.

He’s in his parent’s house in St. Petersburg.  It’s snowing.  His father laughs as he twirls him around the room.  His mother claps as he practices his jumps in the kitchen.  He's crying about his first ever knee sprain, and his mother hugs him and kisses his wrapped knee.

He’s lying on the ice at the Hasetsu Ice Castle.  He’s just finished a performance, he’s dressed in his costume from the Grand Prix final.  Yuri crouches over him, in his own costume, blond hair hanging in his face.  “You were good,” he says, smiling a rare smile.  “That was an amazing performance.”  He leans down and takes a bite out of Viktor’s leg.  Pain shoots through him and he screams.  “You’re still the top skater,” Yurio says, blood dripping from his mouth.  He takes another bite.  “I hope you’ll keep helping coach me.  You’ve really helped.  I—I’m grateful, Viktor.”  Another bite.  He tears at his flesh with his teeth.  “Even if you and the pig are disgusting with each other.”

“Stop,” he groans, “please.”

Yuri takes another bite.  “I can’t.  I’m sorry.”

“Please,” he begs over and over as Yuri eats his leg away.  “Please, it hurts, stop!”

Yuri uses a bloodstained hand to brush the hair out of Viktor’s eyes.  “I’m sorry, Viktor, I’m sorry.  I wish I could help you more.”  Blood drips down his chin.  Viktor’s leg is gone and the ice is a hot rink of his own blood.  “I’m sorry.  Go back to sleep.”

* * *

He wakes.  The tatters of dreams linger, but he feels solid and present.  The hospital room is quiet and dark, save for the beep of a monitor, the slight drip of something, a faint woosh from something else.

He feels so strange.  Like he just ran a marathon and finished a huge competition in the same day.  Like he’s been asleep for months.

He shifts slightly, trying to rearrange his stiff limbs.  He hears a snuffling sound by his arm and turns his head.

Yuuri slumps in a chair, the edge of his cheek barely resting on the side of the bed next to Viktor’s arm.  He’s asleep.

Slowly—because his arm is very reluctant to obey him and there are a number of tubes trailing from his hand and the crook of his elbow—he lifts his hand and rests it on top of Yuuri’s messy head.

Yuuri jerks upright, upsetting his hand and searching wildly for his glasses.  “Viktor?” he asks, peering at him through the darkness.  “Are you awake?”

He grunts in answer and coughs, throat once again too dry to speak.  He’s tired of waking up tired and confused and parched.  He probably looks like hell, too.

“I’ll call in a nurse,” Yuuri says, grabbing a glass of water off the bedside table and sticking the straw between Viktor’s lips.  He gulps too quickly and ends up choking, right when two nurses rush in.  They prop him up and pat him on the back and cluck about him before fiddling with his IVs and asking a lot of questions in Japanese that Viktor is still a little too muddled to understand.  One takes his temperature and seems pleased at what she sees.  They tell Yuuri to make sure he makes Viktor drink more water and leave without answering any of the questions buzzing in his mind.

“What happened?” he asks Yuuri once they’re alone again.  Yuuri sighs and rubs at his eyes, pushing his glasses to the top of his head.

“You had a really bad reaction to the antibiotics they gave you after surgery.  You’ve been pretty out of it the last couple of days.”

“Oh,” he says, trying to think back.  Then—“Oh!”  He scrabbles at his blankets, trying to pull them off his legs, but he’s tucked in tightly and feels too weak to keep fighting his bedding.  “I need to see my leg!”

Yuuri looks puzzled, but he draws the covers back anyway.  His leg is all there—the knee a mound of bandages with some ominous looking tubes coming out of it, but there.

He slumps back onto the pillows in relief.

“Are you alright?” Yuuri asks.

“Yurio ate my leg,” he explains, then closes his eyes again as Yuuri chokes on his own spit. 

* * *

He looks at Yakov.  Yakov looks back.  He’s been sitting by the bed for ten minutes, and other than the formalities—how are you feeling, better, good—they haven’t spoken.  Yakov keeps opening his mouth and closing it again. 

“Okay, Yakov,” he finally breaks the silence, summoning the strength of spirit to shoot a practiced smile at his coach.  “Spill it.  Whatever you’re not saying.”

Yakov sighs.  “I—the doctors have talked to you, yes?”

“Yes,” Viktor nods.  “Dislocated knee joint.  My ACL and LCLs are torn, and my menisci.  An artery was ruptured.  It’s a mess.”

“Yes,” Yakov says again.  Sighs again.  Viktor has never seen his coach this reluctant to speak, and it comes as a shock after years of being at the receiving end of his brutal honesty.

“Viktor, you must know you won't—“

“I’ll skate again,” he interrupts, voice false and loud.  But he isn’t lying, no really.  One of the doctors had suggested as much, given a bit of luck and a brutal physical therapy regimen.

Yakov nods, slowly.  “Possibly.  Probably, knowing you.  But Viktor, you won’t compete.  Your leg will never be at full strength again.  It won’t be able to take it.  I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head.  “Nonsense.”  His voice sounds false to his own ears.  “Obviously not this season, but next season, surely.”

Yakov takes his hand.  The pity in his eyes breaks Viktor in half.  “No, Viktor.  You won’t.”

“But—“

“No.  Viktor, you must understand.  Your leg is permanently damaged.  It will never be the same.  This season was your last.”

Skating.  Flying.  Freedom.  His Grand Prix silver.  The Olympics.

He buries his face in his hands and _howls_.

He can’t help himself.

* * *

Hands in his hair, tangling in the strands, scratching gently at his scalp, brushing his bangs away from his face over and over again.  His head is cushioned on something soft and he is very warm.  He burrows closer.

Voices filter into his consciousness, all recognizable.  Yurio.  Chris.  Mila.  His heart cracks a bit, knowing they’re here for him.

“It’s not a question of whether you should continue competing this season, Katsuki.”  Chris’ voice.  "There aren’t any events till January now, but you can’t possibly suggest you’d drop out on the _Olympics_.”

“Seriously, pig, this moron’s right.  Viktor would kill you if he knew you were considering giving up on the season because of him.”

Mila chuckles.  “You have to work twice as hard now, and win for him too.”

“Not that you will.  You caught me off guard, I’ll admit it, but I won’t let you win again.”

“I don’t know.”  Viktor feels the rumble of Yuuri’s voice as he speaks.  The other man’s smell surrounds him, filling him with comfort. 

“I don’t want to drop out, obviously,” Yuuri continues.  “But I’ll really have to wait and see how he’s doing.  I’m not going to just dump him after something like this happens and go sailing off to the next competition.”

Chris sounds exasperated.  “Honestly, Yuuri, no one’s suggesting that.  But you can be supportive of Viktor’s recovery and still finish out the season.”

Viktor winces at the very thought of it.  Yuuri quitting because of him?  Giving up what’s bound to be a winning season just because of his injury?  His future might be doomed, but he’ll be damned if he takes Yuuri with him.  He feels tears rise behind his eyelids.

Yuuri notices his movement and the hand in his hair stills.  “Viktor?” he asks.

He doesn’t want to face all these people right now, even if he’s grateful they’re there for him.  He doesn’t answer, and keeps his eyes shut tight.

Yuuri sighs and resumes stroking his hair.  “We probably shouldn’t be talking about this now, anyway.  I don’t want to wake him up if he’s actually sleeping.”

Yurio scoffs.  “It’s not like it matters anyway,” he says, like he’s reading Viktor’s mind.  “Viktor won’t let you quit no matter how much you want to be a martyr, and he’s more stubborn than you are.”

 _Damn right_ , he thinks.

“I’m tired,” Yurio announces.  “Otabek!  Let’s go.”

So Otabek is there too, then.  Interesting.  He stores a mental note in the back of his mind to ask Yurio about the exact nature of their relationship once he’s out of the hospital.  Giving Yurio the sex talk would probably be highly entertaining.

The rest make their excuses too and there’s a loud commotion as everyone leaves.  When it’s quiet again, Yuuri sighs deep.  Viktor’s head rises and falls with the force of it.

“Viktor,” Yuuri says quietly, “I know you’re awake.”

He burrows his face deeper into Yuuri’s leg in answer.  “You’re not quitting the season,” he says.

“I will if I want to.  If you need me, I won’t abandon you.”

“I’m done, Yuuri.  But you’re not, and you won’t be because of me.  I won’t let you do it.  I won’t bring you down with me!  You still owe me three gold medals for my troubles with you!”

And then he’s crying again, as he already has for hours, heavy, wet sobs, soaking patches into the sheets and Yuuri’s clothes.  Yuuri sighs and coaxes him up, wrapping him in his arms and fitting Viktor’s face into the crook between his shoulder and neck.  Even after this long together, Yuuri still isn’t an overly tactile person, so Viktor relishes his warmth and comfort.  In Yuuri’s embrace, things don’t seem so scary.  The future doesn’t seem so hopeless.

“I’ll keep competing,” Yuuri whispers fierce in his ear.  “But I’m not just going to leave you to yourself.  We’ll get you back to St. Petersburg and we’ll all be there with you.  You matter more than the season, okay?”

“No,” Viktor whispers between sobs.

“Yes,” Yuuri insists, and kisses away his tears.

* * *

 

A week passes.  They take him off good drugs and stick a horrible cast thing on his leg that keeps it bent at an angle at all hours.  The physical therapy starts.  Things go downhill from there.

The first day of physical therapy, all he gets to do is flex his quad muscles.  The second day, he moves his ankle around and has to lift his leg up and down off the bed twenty times.  The third day, he’s so sore he can hardly move.

“I’m impressed,” the physical therapist says.  “Considering the damage to the tendons, it’s amazing you can do that much.”

Viktor realizes his future doesn’t matter anyway, because he’s going to die of boredom and frustration before he can even get out of bed.

He yells at Yuuri one night for coddling him too much.  Then he cries in front of him the next morning because he hadn’t actually wanted him to leave.  He cries again when Yurio and Mila leave for St. Petersburg.  He hadn’t previously made a habit out of crying in front of people, but now he seems to be doing it at least twice a day.

Yuuri doesn’t come to visit that day.  Viktor texts him, but he doesn’t answer, and Viktor spends that night sleepless, wondering what he did to drive him away.

Vaguely, he senses that his mental state is going downhill.  He doesn’t really feel much about anything anymore; every day is a stretch of numbness overshadowed by the ultimate knowledge that he won’t ever go back to competing, that he’s failed once and for all.  Even when they give him crutches and he manages to totter himself to the bathroom all by himself, he doesn’t feel much more than a thin suggestion of triumph.

The next day, as he practices more with the crutches (he’s now managed to change direction without falling over), Yakov comes in and tells him to get his head out of his ass.

“Honestly, Viktor,” he snaps.  “You had one more competitive season left.  _Maybe_ two.  Then you were all set up to step into coaching, anyway.  So enough with the moping.  Do the physical therapy and plan for the future!”

“I wanted to finish strong!” he yells back.  “I wanted this season to be something I could be proud to end on!  Instead, I’ve turned into a pathetic cripple, and I can never make it up!”  The force of his anger and frustration nearly trips him up and he sits heavily back on the bed, wincing as his knee explodes in protest to the sudden movement.

Yakov sighs and moves toward him, putting a hand on his shoulder.  “I know you’re disappointed.  I am, too.  It’s unfair.  A tragedy.  But it’s no use falling into a depression about something that can’t be changed, eh?  That won’t help you move forward.  You must do as you’ve always done, Viktor.  Set your eyes on the prize, work hard, and move forward.  Promise me that?”

Viktor sighs.  Yakov huffs in frustration.  “Come now.  You’ve already proved yourself an effective coach.  You won’t have any trouble on that front, so long as you follow through with physical therapy and keep that knee as strong as you can.”

“What if I can’t, though?” he asks softly.  He hates the thread of vulnerability in his voice.  “They said I may not even be able to do that.”

“Prove them wrong,” Yakov retorts.  “Surprise them.  It’s what you’ve always done best.”

He manages a miniscule nod he doesn’t really feel.  Yakov nods in satisfaction.  “Good.  I need to go so I don’t miss my flight.  See you in a few days, Viktor.”

He stops Yakov before he leaves.  “Where’s Yuuri?”

Yakov waves a hand.  “He’s been busy, figuring out flight arrangements and what needs to happen back in St. Petersburg once we get you home.  He was down in Hasetsu yesterday to see family and pick up a few things.”

Viktor pouts.  “He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”

Yakov rolls his eyes.  “Well then call him, you idiot.  I’ll see you soon.”

He doesn’t call Yuuri.  He’s found he quite likes moping, sometimes.

* * *

The next day he gets a text from an unknown number in English:

 

 **Unknown:** Hey love, I didn’t realize it but my phone broke and

wasn’t receiving messages or calls

 

 **Unknown:** Also sorry I left without saying anything, got an

urgent call from home.  Everything’s okay, but hope you haven’t

been worried sorry for being an idiot

 

 **Unknown:** you can reach me at this number now, love you

<3 <3

 

He breathes a sigh of relief and texts him back, but a part of him, the part that’s been lying awake every night, still wonders if this is just the start of Yuuri distancing himself.  After all, no matter what Yuuri says, he’s no benefit to him now.  Not even as some sort of trophy/arm candy.  He’s just Viktor now, an ex-champion, a cripple, someone to pity.  Yuuri could have anyone.

He resolves to prepare himself for the worst and doesn’t fall asleep for hours.

* * *

When Yuuri pokes his head into the room the next day his entire body floods with relief, leaving him shaky and nervous.  To hide it he holds his arms out.  “Yuuri-kun!  I missed you!”

Yuuri grins back and delivers himself into Viktor’s arms.  “Missed you too.  How are you feeling?”

Viktor shrugs.  “Better.  I can walk on crutches.  And go to the bathroom by myself.”

“You don’t stay beat for long, do you?”  Yuuri pulls him into a kiss.  “Ready for a long flight?”

He laughs at Viktor’s eager nod, then pulls a Tupperware out of his backpack and plops it on Viktor’s lap.  “My mom made you katsudon.  It won’t be as good cold, but I can pop it in the microwave for you.  She also says she misses you and wants you to come visit as soon as you can, and that she was rooting for you at the final.  I think she was actually disappointed I won.”

He pops the lid off the Tupperware and breathes in the scent.  “Your mother is a goddess.  I was about to drop dead from hospital food.  I’ll eat this cold, I couldn’t care less.”

Yuuri snorts and prods at him until he scoots over in bed so he can get in beside him.  “Drama queen.”

Viktor peers at him over his chopsticks.  “Did you eat some while you were home?”

Yuuri blushes.  “I did win the final, Viktor.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” Yuuri mumbles.

He laughs.  “Of course, you deserve it, love!  I hope you eat as many bowls of katsudon as there are competitions this season.  But of course, as your coach, I’ll have to force you to run five extra miles every day for a week once we’re back in St. Petersburg.  You can’t expect to reward yourself without putting in some extra work!”

He turns back to his own katsudon as Yuuri sputters and turns a deeper shade of red.  For a brief, precious moment, everything turns normal again.  He tries to preserve it in his head, to take out and examine later as a moment of hope.


	2. 恋愛

For the first week back home he stays in bed, only getting up to fulfill the base minimum of his physical therapy requirements.  They celebrate his birthday the day after they get back quietly, with just Yurio and a cake.  Yuuri makes them katsudon, and it’s almost— _almost_ —as good as his mother’s.  They go to bed early, and Yuuri doesn’t let them sleep until he fucks Viktor slowly and thoroughly, love seeping out of every pore, chasing every movement.  For that time, hanging between reality and sleep, he feels young and whole, new.  Beautiful.  Afterwards, though, he lies awake, watching Yuuri sleep.  His face is smooth and innocent, vulnerable and open.  His hair splashes like dark ink against the pillowcase, the faint light from the streetlamp glints off his ring.  Viktor stares at the identical one on his own finger.  More than a year they’ve had these, and yet they’ve never talked about marriage.  About a wedding.  About _when_.  It’s an assumption, he thinks, in both their minds that they will be married at some point, probably sooner rather than later.  They’re as good as, already.  But they’ve never _talked_ about it.  Is that his fault, or Yuuri’s?  Or are they both avoiding the conversation?

He sighs and turns over to stare out the window.  Snow falls gently against the glow of the city.  Makkachin snores at the end of the bed.

The weeks leading up to his birthday this year were so hectic and confusing he never had time to dread it.  Now, here he is, twenty-nine with a bum knee, a supposed fiancée, and a silver medal to end his legacy.  A year from now, he’ll be thirty and everything will _really_ be over.  Thirty.  What a horrific age.  Yakov was right, of course.  It’s not as though he had many seasons left in him, anyway.  He should be grateful.  Many _many_ talented figure skaters have their careers taken from them by worse injuries at far younger ages.

He sighs and sits up.  Makkachin snuffles and opens one eye.  He grabs his crutches and hop-limps to the living room.  He stands, balanced, in front of the window, staring down at the dark city.  It’s late, but the street is busy; pedestrians rushing by, hunched against the snow, cars speeding through the sloshy street.

“Viktor?”

He turns.  Yuuri stands in the doorway, squinting through the darkness without his glasses.  He makes his way to the window, nearly tripping over the coffee table, and wraps his arms around Viktor’s stomach, resting his head in the hollow between his shoulders.  “Love, come back to bed.”

His heart twists every time Yuuri calls him “love”.  Absurdly, tears rise in his eyes.  _Why are you with me?_ He wants to ask.  _Why haven’t you walked away yet?_

Yuuri slides around to look him in the eye.  “What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head.  “Nothing.”  Miraculously, his voice stays even.  “Just can’t sleep.”

Yuuri blinks owlishly at him, hair mussed, the picture of innocence.  Then he smirks.  “Did I not tire you out?  Should I suck you off again?”

He smiles like sin.

When Yuuri crowds him against the wall and drops to his knees, he lets his head fall back and tries to let it all go.

* * *

He becomes a sort of self-imposed hermit.  He leaves the house to visit the doctor and the physical therapist, and sometimes to get groceries.  That’s it.  He masters the crutches.  They take him out of the horrible cast contraption only to put on another, almost as horrible.  He gets vaguely better at cooking, or at least figures out what some of the fancy appliances on his shelves are for.  He lies around with Makkachin and watches a lot of Netflix.  Thankfully, Yuuri runs with the dog every morning, or the poor thing wouldn’t get any exercise at all.  Viktor himself is confined to core workouts and flexing his quad muscles, which is somehow supposed to help heal his knee.  He watches his leg muscles diminish day by day.  The bad leg is skinnier than the good one.  His physical therapist tells him not to worry, that he’s keeping in as good a condition as possible and he’ll gain back the muscles quickly once he’s able.  The assurances don’t make him feel any better.

Thankfully, Yuuri is so busy training he barely notices Viktor’s diminishing fitness and descent into madness.  After the holidays, he throws himself into training like he’s never done before.  He forces Viktor to critique him at home, since Viktor can’t yet bring himself to go back to the rink, and Viktor tries his best to keep up a semblance of coaching, but he feels largely useless. 

Yuuri goes to the European Championchips to cheer on Yurio, and Viktor really ought to go; it’s in Moscow, for crying out loud, but he can’t.  Yurio wins gold and doesn’t talk to him for a week.  Then it’s Four Continents and Yuuri’s gone for five days to Taipei.  He manages to snag first, but calls Viktor crying, saying “I wish you were here, it’s not the same without you, like Rosetlecom all over again,” and Viktor feels like pure scum.  Yuuri apologizes over and over to him for making him feel guilty, but it doesn’t help.  Not really.

But how can he face it?  How can he walk into a rink and watch what should have been his melt away in front of his eyes?  How can he do it, in front of the world, on crutches?

* * *

 

And then it’s the Olympics.

The night before he’s set to leave, Yuuri sits down in front of him at the kitchen island and levels him with a hard gaze.

“Please come with me,” he says.  “Please.”

Viktor has a plane ticket to Korea and accommodation set up, of course.  He’d been planning to compete, after all.  But he’s spent the last two weeks trying to come up with a way to get out of it without being a complete ass.

Now, Yuuri looks at him with his brown eyes and drawn eyebrows and he’s torn in half.

Yuuri gives him a short, formal Japanese bow.  “I’m sorry,” he says.  “I know I’m asking a lot.  If it’s too much, I understand.  I don’t want to push you.  But…it’s my first Olympics.  I’ve never been so scared for a competition.  And I want to win, for both of us.  But,” his eyes flick up to meet Viktor’s.  “I don’t know if I can do it, any of it, without you there.”

Viktor sighs and looks at his hands.  “What use would I be there, Yuuri?  I can’t coach you, not really.  I can’t even walk.  I’d be nothing but a burden and a distraction to you, something else you’d need to worry about.  I’m useless to you right now.”

“Don’t be like this,” Yuuri replies, a touch of anger in his voice.  “I _love you_.  You help me by being there.  You help me stay calm and focused and strong.  Four Continents was awful; I couldn’t even feel that proud of myself because you weren’t there to share it with me.”

“You shouldn’t have felt that proud.  Your performance was sloppy; Yurio and Chris both would have destroyed you if they’d been competing.  You’ve _got_ to figure out that quad flip you keep fumbling in your short program.”

“ _Christ_ , Viktor, lay off.  Either you are my coach or you aren’t, and I don’t need to hear that kind of shit from you if you aren’t.”

“I _can’t_ be your coach right now, because I can’t go with you out on the ice and drill that quad flip into you until you’ll never screw it up again.  So what good am I at the Olympics?”

Yuuri grinds his forehead into the heel of his hand.  “Honestly, Viktor, do you think I just keep you around because you’re my coach?  Would we be living together, having sex, and wearing _engagement rings_ if you were just my coach?  I love you for being an outstanding skater and an invaluable coach, but I also love you because you’re _you_ and also my _partner_!”  He ends in a shout, standing, hands planted on the counter top.  A battle stance.

Viktor hides his head in his hands.

“I’ve…not been good,” he says eventually.

Yuuri sighs and slumps back down on his stool.  “No.  But neither have I.”

“I should have been at Europeans and Four Continents.  I should be at least trying to help you train still.”

Yuuri nods.  “True.  Even if you’ve decided you can’t coach me, we haven’t agreed on it, and a coach can’t just drop his student without telling him.  As far as I’m concerned, you’re still my coach. 

“But I haven’t acted as I should, either.  I promised you I’d be here, helping and supporting you.  I’ve let myself put training and competing ahead of that.  I broke my promise.  What I said was true; you’re more important than the season.  But I haven’t been here for you.”

“You have,” Viktor whispers, thinking of all the nights Yuuri has dragged him back to bed, away from his insomnia, cooked for him, driven him to appointments, held him at night when he’s awoken, tears in his eyes, from dreams of the ice.

“No,” Yuuri shakes his head and reaches out his hand to grasp Viktor’s.  “Not as I should be.  But from now on I’ll be better.”

He sighs and tightens his grip.  “I want you there at the Olympics.  With me.  I can’t imagine doing that without you.  But I understand.  And I would never want to force you to do what you’re not ready to do, okay?  If you’re not ready for it, it’s okay.  I’ll make it through and still win gold for both of us.”

Viktor looks at him.

It’s true he doesn’t deserve Yuuri.  Probably he never did, but now, with the way things are, with what he is, he definitely doesn’t.

That doesn’t mean he should give Yuuri up, though.  He’s Viktor Nikiforov, for fuck’s sake.  He still has a legacy, and he’s still pretty attractive, even without leg muscles.

And if there’s anyone he ought to fight for, it’s Yuuri.  Awkward, beautiful, sexy, anxious, pole-dancing Yuuri, who’s given Viktor everything over the past year and a half.  If that means appearing on crutches, just to be able to hug Yuuri after every performance, so be it.

“Okay,” he says.  “I’ll go to Pyeongchang.” 

* * *

He still thinks it was the right thing to do right up until he has seven microphones and five languages stuck in his face outside the ice arena.  Outwardly, he smiles and answers as many questions as he can as vaguely as possible.  Inwardly, he panics and casts his eyes around behind his sunglasses for anyone—anything—that can save him.

The answer comes unexpectedly, and from behind.

“Viktor!”  An arm around his shoulders.  The overpowering scent of Old Spice.  Two hands, making Js for the flashing cameras.

Christ.

“So good to see you!” Jean-Jacques Leroy says, pulling him away from the knot of photographers and towards the entrance.  Viktor struggles to keep up with his long stride.  “I heard you’d be here.  I wanted to ask some advice...”

He drops the act as soon as they get through the door and winks, grinning lazily.

“Our favorite Russian seems a little tongue-tied.  How’s the knee?”

He grits his teeth.  “Thank you, Jean.”

JJ shrugs expansively.  “Well, you’ve helpfully eliminated yourself from competition.  It’s the least I can do.”

Viktor has spent a lot of time actively wanting to strangle JJ.  Never more than now.  He distracts himself by the glint on JJ’s finger.  “You’re married?”

JJ grins.  “Yep.  Right after the finals.  And boy—have you seen Isabella lately?  She gets hotter every year, I swear.”

“Congratulations,” he bites out.

“Hey, thanks!” JJ’s face softens and a slow smile spreads across his face.  “We’re gonna have a baby, you know.  She’s already pregnant.  Can you believe that, Nikiforov?  A kid!”

“Congratulations,” he says again, actually meaning it this time.

“Yeah.  Yeah, it’s gonna be good.  I’m—well.”  He seems to shake himself, and the momentary softness is gone.  “Anyway, when are you and Katsuki getting hitched?”

“I’ll see you later, Jean.  Thanks for helping me out back there.”  He limps away, crutches squeaking against the linoleum. 

“I expect an invite!” JJ calls after him, laughing.

He’s flustered and gets a bit lost trying to avoid any other reporters, but eventually runs into a harried-looking Yakov and a bored looking Yurio, stretching outside of the changing rooms.

“Viktor, there you are!  Where’s Yuuri?”  Yakov snaps as soon as he sees him.

“I don’t know, I assumed he’d be with you.  Did he get that quad flip solid at practice this morning?”

“Not particularly,” Yakov growls.  “I thought he’d be with you.”

“I just got here!  I’ve been wandering around for twenty minutes trying to avoid reporters!”  He checks his watch.  “Doesn’t this thing start in less than an hour?”

“ _You_ got lost avoiding reporters?”  Yurio smirks.  “The golden boy doesn’t want to get interviewed?”

He scowls in Yurio’s direction.  “The golden boy didn’t want to give them a step-by-step analysis of his prognosis or break the news that there will be no triumphant return.”

Yakov rounds on him.  “Did you tell them anything?”

He shakes his head.  “Nothing meaningful.  _Jean-Jacques_ rescued me.”

Yurio makes a face.  “Did he talk to you about his fucking wedding and how hot his wife is?  I wanted to punch him in the dick.”

“They’re having a baby,” Viktor informs him.  Yurio makes a gagging noise.  “Gross.  Maybe he’ll finally retire.”

“Yuri,” Yakov thunders, pointing down the hall.  “Go get changed.  And _you_ ,” he rounds on Viktor, “go find your fiancée and make sure he’s ready to skate in thirty minutes.  I need to find Lilia.”  He stalks down the hall.

Yurio glowers after him.  “He’s super distracted.  I swear they’re back together.  I’m going to find Otabek.”

“Make sure you’re ready too!” Viktor calls after him.  Yurio flips him off.

So now to find Yuuri.  An hour before his first Olympic competition.  Viktor can think of a number of possible scenarios, all of them involving anxiety attacks.  He hobbles toward the nearest bathroom.

He doesn’t find him there, but he does find him in a different one, buried in the basement between supply rooms, a janitorial closet, and the women’s locker room.  He doesn’t see Yuuri, per se, but he does see Yuuri’s knees under the door of a stall.

“Yuuri-kun,” he calls.  “You’re getting your costume dirty.”

A groan, followed by loud retching, answers.

He steps closer.  “Yuuri?  Will you let me in?”

Another groan.

“I’ll kick down the door and then we’ll have to pay for damages.”

The door unlatches and swings slowly open, revealing Yuuri, slumped over the toilet, pale and sweaty, hair hanging in his face.

“Oh love,” Viktor breathes, moving next to him and sweeping the hair out of his face.  He pries the hair band off Yuuri’s wrist and secures his hair out of his face, safe from any errant vomit.

“Close the door,” Yuuri rasps.  He obeys.

“What happened?”

“Dunno.  Couldn’t land my flip clean.  Put on my costume and started panicking.”

“How much have you thrown up?”

“A lot.”

He’s green, and clammy to the touch.  Viktor curses anxiety disorders.  “We need to get you cleaned up.  It’s starting soon.”

“Ugh,” Yuuri moans, and leans over heaving.  From the sounds of it, there’s nothing much left to come up.  Yuuri’s breath catches as he heaves.

“Yuuri.  Yuuri, calm down, okay?” he cups the back of Yuuri’s neck.  “Breathe with me.  Listen.  What’s different about today than any other competition?”

“It’s the Olympics!” Yuuri wheezes.

“How is that any different from the Grand Prix finals?  Or Worlds?”

“It’s the _Olympics_!!”

“All that means is more mediocre skaters for you to stand out from.  Yuuri.  Listen.  _Listen to me!_ ”  He leans down as far as his knee and the cramped stall will allow and whispers soft in Yuuri’s ear.  “You’re more than ready for this.  You’ve proven that.  You’ve faced all these skaters before and _beat them_.  Because you’re more skilled.  How is this different than any of the other times you’ve skated and won?”

Yuuri hiccups.

“Your short program is strong.  If your mind’s in it and not distracted, it doesn’t matter if you step out of your flip, though you’d better not.  You just need to let the story come out, which you’re excellent at achieving.  Here.  Sit back.”  He guides Yuuri away from the toilet to slump against the side of the stall and flushes the toilet.  He shoves a half-full bottle of water into Yuuri’s hands.  “Drink this all.  You need to rehydrate.”

Shakily, Yuuri drinks.  Viktor wipes the sweat off his face with toilet paper.  “We need to get your hair taken care of.”

“I think I threw up on it,” Yuuri says miserably, finishing the water.  Viktor’s fingers twitch with horror.  What if he touched that by accident?  “I should have kept my gloves on.”

Yuuri raises his gaze to meet Viktor’s.  He stares long and hard.  “Viktor,” he says eventually.  “Do you believe in me?”

“Yes,” he answers without hesitation.  “Do you?”

Yuuri shuts his eyes and sets his mouth in a hard line.  His fingers clench the water bottle tight enough for the plastic to crumple.  “Yes.”

“Good,” says Viktor.  “Let’s get you ready.”

* * *

Yuuri is the twelfth scheduled skater, which means they have to sit through a half hour of other people before he can finally get it over with.  Though Viktor isn’t particularly impressed—Chris skates well, as does Seung-gil, and JJ messes up his step sequence, much to Viktor’s delight—Yuuri looks steadily greener as each skater performs.  The upside of this is that Viktor is too worried about Yuuri to feel depressed about not being on the ice himself.

Leo finishes his routine with a flourish and Yuuri sets his face in a carefully-schooled look of determination.  Yakov and Viktor follow him to the barrier.  Yakov clasps his shoulder and squeezes.  Yuuri steps onto the ice.

Before gliding out, he turns and grabs Viktor’s chin between his fingers.  He pulls him close.

“Don’t take your eyes off of me.”

“As if I ever could.”

Yuuri quirks a small smile and Viktor’s heart starts to pound.

He skates to the center of the ice and takes his pose. 

And then performs his program so confidently Viktor can barely recognize the boy from the bathroom stall.  He steps out of the flip, but it’s such a small mistake most of the audience probably didn’t even catch it.  While the judges certainly would notice, he doesn’t think it will destroy Yuuri’s score.  His technical mistakes are nothing compared to the story he’s telling with his body.  His program is based on the Shinto legend of Susanoo, the storm god, and his anger at being banished from heaven by his sister Amaterasu.  It’s an extremely dramatic story and Yuuri performs it extraordinarily well.  He’s not a particularly dramatic person in his day to day life, so seeing him as expressive as he is in this program always gives Viktor a thrill.  Today, Yuuri gives him more than a thrill, and by the time he finishes Viktor’s knees are weak and he’s hanging onto the barrier with two white-knuckled hands.  Beside him, Yakov’s mouth hangs open.

“Have you ever seen him skate that like that?”

Yakov shakes his head.

The crowd is going insane.  Yuuri takes his bow and skates towards them, looking alarmingly calm considering what he just pulled off.

“I saw you watching,” Yuuri says, and smirks.

Honestly, sometimes Viktor wonders if Yuuri is two completely different people.  His shaking, anxiety-ridden self is so different from how devastatingly sexy he can be when he’s feeling self-confident.

“That was amazing,” he croaks out and, for the third time, he kisses Yuuri on live television.

They take longer to pull apart this time, though.  The only thing that stops them is Yakov’s angry elbow stabbing the small of Viktor’s back.

“Well, Yuuri,” Yakov says once they’re all seated at the kiss and cry.  “I must say, you had a few technical blunders there, but I’ve never seen you perform that with better style than you just did.”

“Thanks,” Yuuri says, seeming almost taken aback by Yakov’s praise.

Predictably, he scores well, narrowly missing a personal best.  “I told you so,” Viktor says.  “You don’t have any reason _not_ to be completely confident in yourself.”

Yuuri snorts, but smiles.

They stick around to watch Yurio and Otabek and a few others.  Now that he doesn’t have Yuuri to worry about, he falls back into regret.  Leaning against the barrier, he lets himself think about his own short program.  It hadn’t been his favorite program, but it was fun, far different than usual, performed to music that was a mesh of classical and electronic.  He’d been performing it well, too; it was more solid than his free program.  He’d choreographed it himself, with Lilia’s help, and it had illustrated his emotional as well as professional shifts since meeting Yuuri.

He would have won with it.

And how perfect would it have been to end his competitive career with an Olympic encore?

Maybe he’s bitter.  The thing is, he would have been sad no matter what when he retired.  Retirement marks an end of an era, a happy and successful one.  There were bad things, certainly, that he wouldn’t have been sad to leave—the loneliness, the pressure.  Transitioning out of competing wouldn’t have been entirely terrible.  But it hurts because he wasn’t able to end it, not really.  Not on his terms.  He likes things clean, wrapped up and finished thoroughly and to the best of his abilities.  And this—he wasn’t able to end it, to retire with satisfaction and dignity.  It was just… _over_.  Just like that.

He likes coaching, he really does.  His season with Yuuri was one of the best of his life—partially because he was falling in love, partially because he was discovering a part of himself he’d never bothered to explore.  But even that joy could be denied him, if his knee decides to be contrary.

The uncertainty of it all unsettles him.  He likes a plan, an outlook, a path forward.  He can’t see in front of him, now.  He could come out of it fine, or he could walk right off a cliff, and he wouldn’t even know it until he landed at the bottom.

“Viktor?” A light touch on his elbow.  Yuuri, changed out of his costume and looking exhausted.  “Do you want to go?”

He nods, eyes still fixed on the ice.  He doesn’t even recognize whoever’s performing now, though they just fell on an embarrassingly simple triple toe loop, which honestly gives Viktor a bit of secondhand embarrassment.

Yuuri frowns.  “You look sad.”

He tears his eyes away from the rink.  “Just thinking.”

Yakov pats them both on the back as they leave.  “Get some rest, Yuuri,” he says.  “You don’t have to worry about competing tomorrow, just relax a bit, okay?”

They’ve almost made it out the door when something small barrels into Yuuri, nearly knocking them both over.  Viktor swears, tottering on his crutches, while Yuuri sputters.  “What?” he gasps.  “Oh—oh my god, Phichit?”

“Yuuri!” Phichit cries, embracing him again.  “Your performance was beautiful!  And Viktor!” he lets Yuuri go and latches on to Viktor instead.  “I heard what happened!  I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I didn’t realize _you’d_ be here!” Yuuri laughs.  “It’s good to see you!”

“I tried to text,” Phichit says, “but you didn’t answer.”

“Oh, yeah,” Yuuri looks sheepish.  “My phone broke.  I’ll give you my new number.”  He takes Phichit’s phone and starts tapping at the screen.

“Anyway, I’m glad I caught you.  Do you want to go to dinner tonight? I want to catch up.  I already saw Chris and Emil and Leo, they’re all in.  Of course, you look tired, so no big deal if you’re not feeling it.”

Yuuri shakes his head.  “No, no!  I’d love to!”  Inwardly, Viktor groans.  All he really wants to do with the evening is take some painkillers and not think about figure skating for a bit.  If they’re all out together, something’s bound to end up on social media, and he’d prefer to stay out of that.  He himself hasn’t posted anything since before the Grand Prix final, other than a polished statement giving a vague update on his condition and thanking fans for their support.

Phichit turns his wide eyes on him.  “And you, Viktor?”

Yuuri shoots him a hopeful look and his hopes of a quiet, early night dissipate.  “Yeah.  Of course.”

“ _Great_!” Phichit squeals.  “I’m going to go track down Celestino.  See you guys tonight!”

Yuuri waves goodbye as Phichit dashes off, then turns back to Viktor.  “Sorry, love.  But it’ll be good for you to get out with some friends.  You’re becoming a bit of a shut-in.”

He resents the fact that Yuuri’s noticed, but he can’t argue, because it’s not exactly an inaccurate statement.

They meet at a Korean barbeque place near the athlete’s village that’s absolutely packed.  Thankfully, they have such a huge group the waiter leads them into a back room that’s far emptier.  In the end, Phichit’s managed to round up just about everyone including Celestino, Mila and Sara, Yakov, and Minako and Mari.  There are nearly twenty of them.  The waiter looks quite overwhelmed.

The food’s delicious, and there’s a lot of good Korean beer, so about halfway through the meal Viktor decides he might as well get roaring drunk.  He doesn’t feel like answering any more questions about his knee or his future, mostly because everyone here is either a friend or a friend of a friend and already knows everything about his knee and future that there is to know.

His jacket’s off and he’s drunkenly leaning against Yuuri for support when Phichit leans across the table to talk to him.  At this point, a few people have already drifted off, back to their hotels and apartments, and everyone left has committed to getting at least a little drunk.  Phichit himself has managed to down almost as many beers as Viktor.

“So,” he says conspiratorially, “what’s up with you and Yuuri these days?”

He glances over at Yuuri, who’s engrossed in conversation with Mila, Yurio, and Sara about something related to Yakov and Lilia.  “I don’t—nothing new, I guess.”

Phichit rolls his eyes.  “Seriously? I mean, have you set a date or something?  He has won gold, you know.  A few times.”

He grimaces and downs the rest of his beer.  “I know.  We haven’t really talked about it.”

Phichit clicks his tongue.  “I’ve got news for you.  He’s a real slow mover.  I guarantee he’s still half unconvinced you actually want to marry him in the first place.”

Viktor’s too drunk for this conversation.  “Why wouldn’t I want to marry him?  He’s perfect.”

Phichit rolls his eyes again.  “Of course he is.  But you know by now he also doesn’t have much faith in himself.  He’s a little challenged when it comes to self-worth.”

“I know.” Viktor scowls.  “He shouldn’t be.”  He sighs and leans his head on Yuuri’s shoulder.  “You’re perfect Yuuri, you know that, right?”

Yuuri absentmindedly reaches back and pats his head without breaking his conversation.  He feels his own lips settle into a pout and starts to unbutton his shirt.  Phichit pulls out his phone and snaps a photo.  “Anyway,” Phichit continues, “I don’t doubt he knows you love him.  He’s probably still just scared.”

The waiter delivers another beer.  Viktor takes a swig and slumps over the table.  “I don’t know.  Maybe I’m not what he needs anymore, Phichit.  He could have anyone.”

Phichit looks alarmed.  “I’m pretty sure he wants you.”

“I can’t skate, Phichit.  I’m ruined.”

Phichit snorts.  “I don’t think you really understand the depth of his devotions.  He’s obsessed.  Our entire dorm room was covered in posters of your face.  He watched every single competition.  He’s admired you for at least eleven years.  And I’ve never seen him happier than he was last year when he actually got to know you and work with you.”

“Yeah, he idolized Viktor Nikiforov, champion skater.  Now he’s got this,” he gestures at himself sloppily.

“Yeah,” Phichit says, eyeing him.  “Still Viktor Nikiforov, champion skater and excellent coach.”

He gulps the rest of his beer.  Phichit rolls his eyes and pats his hand.  “Believe me, you really have nothing to worry about on your end.”

“Ugh,” he replies.

“Let’s get you another beer,” Phichit says.

“Yes,” Viktor agrees, and takes off his shirt.

“You doing alright, love?” Yuuri asks, finally finished with his conversation.

“Yes,” he says, wrapping his arms around Yuuri.  “My knee doesn’t hurt and I love you.”

“Your shirt's off,” Yuuri says, sounding amused.  “We should probably leave soon.”

“Noooo,” he whines.  “I’m talking to Phichit!”

Yuuri laughs and wraps an arm around him.  He sort of tunes out the conversation, leaning against Yuuri as he talks to Phichit about his ice show, what it’s like working as a professional, whether or not he’s thinking about returning to competing next season.  He finishes his beer.  He hugs Yurio for a while and compliments him on his performance, much to Yurio’s chagrin.  He tries to order another beer, but Yuuri stops him.

He’s feeling very loose and tired by the time they get back to their rooms in the athlete’s village.  He remembers flopping on the bed, letting Yuuri take off his shoes and shove a pillow under his head.

“Will you still marry me?” he asks, “even now?”

Yuuri’s face appears above him, tired and confused and a little drunk.  “What are you talking about?”

“You,” he answers, “and me.”  He holds up his hand and wiggles it around, watching the lamplight glint off the ring.

“Viktor, you’re drunk.  Go to sleep.”  He pulls the covers from underneath Viktor’s prone body and deposits them on top of him. 

“Yuuri,” he whines.  “I just—I just want to be with you.”

Yuuri sighs and leans down to kiss him.  “You _are_ , Viktor.”

And Viktor sleeps.

* * *

The next morning he wakes late, with a splitting headache.  Yuuri is already gone, presumably to practice.  He stumbles out of bed, drinks down three glasses of water, and then tries to decide what to do with his day.

Women’s short programs are today.  He should probably go to at least Mila and Sara’s.

He should also go help Yuuri.  For some reason, being at the rink for the express purpose of coaching seems so much bigger than just being there for the competition.

But he should try.  Yuuri promised he would be better, and now its Viktor’s turn to follow through on his side of the deal—actually make an effort to coach.  He has to prove to Yuuri he’s still somewhat useful, after all.

He takes some painkillers and heads to the rink.  There are several skaters practicing, making use of the free time before the womens’ competition starts that evening.  Yuuri and Yurio are both there, with Yakov yelling at them (abuse or encouragement?  It’s hard to tell) across the ice.  Yurio notices him first and immediately scowls, stomping across the ice to confront him at the barrier.

“You’re disgusting; you know that?  What is it with you and stripping every time you get slightly tipsy, huh?  And for future reference, you do not have permission to _touch_ me or _talk_ to me the next time you’re half naked.  Got it?”

“Oh, Yurochka,” he argues, just to see Yurio get angrier.  “It could be worse.  Think about Yuuri and Christophe the last time _they_ got smashed!”

“At least they don’t make a habit of it.  And they didn’t act disgustingly love struck like you do.”

“They _pole danced_ ,” Mila shouts across the ice.

“Speaking of love struck,” he says slyly, draping himself across the barrier, “what’s going on with you and Otabek? You seem quite _close_.”  He makes sure his voice drips with innuendo.  Yurio sputters.  “We’re _friends_!”

“You’re blushing,” he observes.

“Shut up!” Yurio yells, and skates away.

He laughs to himself until Yuuri finishes his practice routine, then waves him over.

“It looks good,” he says.  “You could use some minute precision work on the step sequence, but you’ve improved it beyond where it was at the Grand Prix.  It has much more character.  Nice salchow.  But you seem distracted.  Are you alright?”

Yuuri blushes and doesn’t meet his eyes.  “I should be asking you that.  How are you feeling, after last night?”

“Hungover,” he admits cheerfully.  “But already much better thanks to painkillers and some very strong coffee.  Now tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Nothing’s bothering me,” Yuuri mutters.  “Just thinking about tomorrow.  What do you mean, about the step sequence?”

Viktor knows him well enough to tell he’s lying, but he doesn’t pry.  Yuuri will talk when he wants to, not before.  “It’s lacking in character and doesn’t fit well with the rest of the program, which has so much.  It’s a beautiful sequence, but you need to breathe some life into it.  Let me hear that part of the music?”

For the rest of the morning, he throws himself into coaching and finds himself enjoying it, despite his inability to actually get out on the ice.  He thinks he’s done a good job, too; both he and Yakov agree that Yuuri’s performance looks more polished by the end of the morning.  He’s thrown back into doubts, however, as Yuuri is distant and distracted at lunch and begs off afterwards.  “I want to find Minako,” he explains.  “Dance a little, maybe.”

“Don’t tire yourself out too much,” he says, but Yuuri only nods his head absently and wanders away, looking completely lost.

Yurio slumps over the table and closes his eyes.  “I’ll definitely beat him if he’s acting like this tomorrow.”

“You will,” Viktor acknowledges, because something is definitely off.  “I should go after him.”

Yurio groans.  “Just leave him alone, moron.  He clearly doesn’t want company, he probably just wants to get rid of some of his stress.  He does this all the time.”

Viktor wrings his gloves between his hands and doesn’t answer. 

Yurio sighs and gives him a look of disgust.  “You know what you need?  A distraction.  Yakov’s making me rest for the rest of today, and you’re going to take me sightseeing.”

“Me?  You want to go with me?”

“No, dumbass, but I also don’t want to keep looking at your depressing face.”  He stands and stalks out of the restaurant, leaving Viktor to hurriedly pay the bill and scramble clumsily after him. 

“So…where did you want to go?  I hope it doesn’t involve too much walking.”

Yurio’s eyes are glued on the mountains.  “I want to go up there.”

Viktor groans.  “I can’t _hike,_ Yurio.”

“What, do you think I’m stupid?  There’s a bus, moron.  Then a gondola.  How else would all the tourists get up there?”

They cram on a bus full of grim-faced skiers headed to practice and talkative locals.  Incredibly no one recognizes or attempts to talk to them, though an older lady does insist on giving up her seat once she notices his crutches.  He feels guilty, but his knee really does hurt a bit and he figures it would be just as rude to refuse.

They end up at the ski resort being used for the downhill and snowboarding events and wander around for awhile, watching the people until they find an overlook at the edge of the gondola station.  Yurio hangs over the railing like a little kid, while Viktor slumps onto a bench, exhausted.

“That’s North Korea,” Yurio says, pointing along the spine of the mountains.  All Viktor can see is an endless edge of rock capped in white, dotted by sparse clusters of evergreens.  Yurio waves, eyes distant.

“What are you waving at?”

Yurio shrugs.  “North Korea, I guess. The mountains.”  A bitter gust of wind lifts Yurio’s hair off his shoulders and sends a shudder through Viktor.

“This reminds me of home,” Yurio says softly.  He sounds almost sad.  Viktor heaves himself up off his bench and joins Yurio at the edge.  “Moscow?”

“Yekaterinburg.  I grew up there.  The Urals look like this in winter.”

“You grew up in _Yekaterinburg_?” Viktor asks, shocked.  How hadn’t he known that?  “But your grandfather’s in Moscow—“

“I moved there when I was nine.  When I started training seriously.  After my parents—“ he breaks off and resumes staring into space.  Viktor knows better than to press him.  He knows Yuri’s mother died when he was young, and that his father is out of the picture.  That’s all he needs to know, until Yuri decides to tell him more.

“Do you ever miss it?” he risks asking.  Yurio snorts.  “Yekaterinburg?  No.  But I miss the mountains.  We used to go sometimes, on holidays or weekends.  I liked how big and empty it seemed.  There’s nowhere like that in Moscow or St. Petersburg.”

Viktor hums.  “There are places not far outside the city.”

“Never seen it.  Can’t exactly grab my car and leave for a few hours, can I?”

“I’d take you sometime,” Viktor offers.  “If you’d like.”

Yurio doesn’t answer.  He also doesn’t say no.  His eyes stay fixed on the horizon, where clouds build over nearby peaks.

“I like empty places too,” Viktor finally says to fill the silence.  “They feel more free.  Like when you’re skating all alone.  Everyone needs that sometimes.”

Eventually Yuri nods.  “Yeah,” he acknowledges.  Another gust of wind smashes into them, bringing the first stinging hint of snow with it.  “I’m cold,” Yurio announces abruptly, and turns his back to go inside.

They get green tea to warm up, so similar to what Yuuri’s parents serve at their inn it brings a lump to Viktor’s throat.  But it’s good—Yurio actually talks to him; just about skating, but it gets Viktor’s mind off Yuuri and his knee.  On the bus back into town, a few people recognize them and Viktor spends half the ride taking commemorative photos while Yurio sulks in the background.  When the bus stops near the athlete’s village, Yurio goes in the opposite direction, mumbling something about meeting Otabek for dinner before the women's competition starts.  Viktor stops him before he disappears. 

“Hey,” he says.  “Thanks.”

Yurio shrugs.  “Whatever.”

Viktor steps close to him and gives him a short hug, made awkward and slightly painful by the crutches.  “No.  Really.  Thank you.  And, by the way, your free program looks amazing.  You’ll do well tomorrow.”  He means it.  He wants Yuuri to win, desperately, but if Yurio pulls gold instead…well, it would be more than well earned.

Yuri gifts him with a tiny smile and a slight blush.  “Thanks,” he says, toeing at the ground.

“Okay, go,” Viktor says, giving him a shove.  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Yurio disappears down the street and Viktor slowly limps his way by the row of shops leading to the athlete’s village.  His knee feels pretty good, all things considered, and he’s pretty proud of how nimble he’s become with the crutches.  At this rate, he’ll be off them after the Olympics rather than the beginning of March.  He smiles at the thought.

A familiar head of hair, pulled back in a messy approximation of a bun catches his eye through a shop window and stops him in his tracks.  It’s Yuuri, hunched over and looking at something in a display case.  Phichit stands close by his side, pointing.

Something in Viktor’s chest wavers and cracks.

They were only on the mountain for around two hours.  If Yuuri had gone to dance, or back to the rink to practice, he would have been occupied for more time.  Viktor knows him, knows how obsessive and hardworking he can be.  Which leaves only one option.

Yuuri lied to him.

To get away from him.

He stares through the window.  Yuuri laughs at something Phichit says, their heads bent close together.  Yuuri had been so excited to see him.  And they’d been so close in Detroit, though Yuuri had never told him any details about their relationship…

He shakes his head firmly.  No.  Just last night, Phichit gave him a thirty minute lecture on how obsessed Yuuri was with him.

Which clearly hadn’t been the complete truth, considering Yuuri had turned around and lied to get away from him today.

Yuuri turns toward the window and something in Viktor’s brain clicks him back to reality.  He scrambles away from the shop and speed-hobbles back to the apartment, where he spends the rest of the night alternately crying and scrolling through old videos of Makkachin on his phone, women's competition completely forgotten.  Maybe he’s overreacting.  But then again, maybe he’s not.  The way Yuuri was looking at Phichit….  And Phichit is the twenty-one year old star of a hit ice show in Thailand, still developing his talents, a very likely contender for next year’s season.  Compared to him, Viktor’s a senior citizen, a thing of the past.  If he wasn’t intimately involved in the situation, he’d tell Yuuri to dump him and go after Phichit himself.

By the time Yuuri gets in three hours later, Viktor’s already in bed with the lights out.  When Yuuri calls his name softly and gently tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, he pretends to be asleep.

* * *

He’s out of sorts the next day, a deep feeling of numbness covering him, blurring reality.  Thankfully, Yuuri is already up and gone.  The competition starts at one, so he’d set his alarm early to make sure he gets to the rink in time for last practices and warm ups, but Yuuri probably didn’t sleep at all, so Viktor’s not surprised he’s gone.

He's decided, last night as he did not sleep, to be the perfect coach.  Through the Olympics, maybe through Worlds if he can pull himself together that much.  Then he’s going to sit Yuuri down and they’re going to have a talk.  And he’s going to tell him the truth—that he can’t coach, he can’t do anything anymore.  That Yakov will be much better for Yuuri’s professional development, and that Viktor can’t offer him what he deserves, in coaching or in love, anymore.

Then he’s going to retire to Siberia and hopefully never see anyone in the world ever again.

It sounds dramatic when he practices it out loud to himself in the mirror, but that’s basically how he’s decided it will play out, more or less.

He drags himself to the rink.  Gives Yurio some last minute advice.  Goes through the quad flip and step sequence over and over with Yuuri until he’s performing it perfectly.  Yuuri seems surprisingly calm, though he’s still acting unbearably distant.  Viktor pushes his sadness all the way down to his toes and tries to focus on just today.  This hour.  This second.

The skaters start to dissipate. He follows Yakov and Yurio to the changing rooms.  Yuuri insists on staying behind to practice “just a few more things”, and tells Viktor to go help Yurio.  Viktor obeys.  Yurio asks him to braid his hair begrudgingly, after two attempts on his own.  He does, making sure it’s tight and strong, with no chance of it coming lose.  He has a lot of practice, after all.  Yurio’s hair, growing past his shoulders now, reminds him painfully of his own when he was young.

“You need to figure out something better to do with the pig’s hair,” Yurio snaps after he’s done.  “It looks stupid slicked back when it’s as long as it is.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, it’s not _my_ job.  Just leave it down or something.  I’m going to warm up.”  He makes to stalk away but Viktor reaches out and stops him.  He stands, unsteady without his crutches, and wraps Yurio in a hug.  He’s tense at first, but eventually realizes and lifts an arm to wrap it loosely around Viktor.  It’s the second time in as many days he’s hugged Yurio, and he’s not dead yet.  At least there’s one semi-successful relationship left in his life.

“Good luck,” he says.  “You’ll do amazing.”

Yurio snorts.  “I know you want Yuuri to win.  You can chill with the compliments.”

“As his coach and partner, of course I want him to win.  But I won’t be sad if you take home gold, either.”

Yurio blushes a bit and pulls away.  “Don’t get too sappy, old man,” he mutters.  But he’s smiling as he walks away.

Yakov rushes after him, zeroing in on Viktor.  “Find Yuuri,” he says, pointing at him, and then he’s gone.

Sometime in the last two months his job as a coach has gone from actually coaching to “find Yuuri before competitions and make sure he isn’t having a nervous breakdown”.  He sighs, heaves himself to his feet, and goes to find the bathroom. 

Yuuri’s leaned over a sink in the first one he walks into.  He’s dressed in his costume and staring at himself in the mirror, looking rather lost.

“Hi Viktor,” he says when Viktor pushes the door open.

“Hi Yuuri,” he replies.  Then Yuuri turns around to face him and he almost falls over because Yuuri is wearing makeup.  Not, like, a lot of makeup, but enough to accentuate his eyes with dark lines and some sort of silvery glitter, and bring out his already stunning cheekbones and is that silver glitter on his lips, too?  And it’s not like Viktor doesn’t have a lot of experience with makeup; he’s a figure skater for Christ sakes, everyone has at least one routine where they’re wearing it, but.  He’s never seen Yuuri in makeup before.  He certainly hasn't for this particular program.  And honestly just looking at him makes him feel light headed.

Yuuri’s looking at him like he’s grown a second head.  It might have something to do with the fact he’s nearly collapsed against the doorway.  He tries to straighten up to save some of his dignity.

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asks.

“Yes.  Why?  Are you okay?  What are you doing?”

“Just…getting ready.”

Viktor peers at him and notices the thin sheen of sweat and wide eyes he’d missed at first glance.  “You’re panicking.”

“Maybe a bit.  Not too bad though.”  He laughs, high and wild.

“Yuuri…your performance is incredible.  It’s the best you’ve ever skated.  You’re skating at a higher level than you were even at the Grand Prix.”

“I know!  I know, Viktor!”

“That’s the kind of confidence I like to hear.  Just remember you’re more than ready for this.”

“ _That’s not what I’m worried about_!”

“It—isnt?”

Yuuri groans and lets his forehead fall against the mirror.  Viktor springs forward.  “No!  Yuuri, you’ll mess up the makeup!”

“I don’t give a fuck about the makeup,” Yuuri says.

“I do.  I give fucks about the makeup.”

“Do you…like the makeup?”

“I—yes, I really like the makeup.”

“Oh,” Yuuri sighs.  “Well, that’s good I guess.  I was thinking it looked a bit much.”

“No.  No, it definitely goes really well with the rest of the costume and you shouldn’t take it off because not only will you be the most skilled skater out there today, you’ll also be the most stunning in every way.”

Yuuri shoots him a small smile.  “I appreciate the confidence.”

Viktor brushes his hair out of his eyes.  “I can tell you have a lot on your mind right now.  You know what happens when you get distracted during a big performance.  You _can’t_ let that happen today.”  He turns Yuuri’s face to look at him directly.  “You have to promise me something.  I always promise I won’t take my eyes off you.  I never can.  But today, you can’t take your mind off of what story it is you’re telling.  You’re so good at telling it, Yuuri—you can’t let it leave your mind for even a moment.”

“I won’t,” Yuuri whispers.  He starts to slick back his hair, but Viktor stops him.  “You should leave it down today.”

“What?  Why?  It’ll get in my eyes.”

Viktor digs around in his pocket and comes up with an extra bobby pin.  He tucks back and secures a portion of Yuuri’s bangs and ruffles his hand through the rest of it.  “There.”

Yuuri squints at himself in the mirror and tugs uncertainly at a chin-length strand.  “You sure?  It looks a bit—different.”

“It looks good.  Different is good, remember?”

“Right.  _Right_.”  He stands up straight and breathes out long, schooling his features into an expression of aloof confidence.  He hands his glasses to Viktor.  “Are you ready for this?”

“Am _I_ ready for this?” Viktor asks, confused.

“Yeah,” Yuuri says, one eyebrow raised like a challenge.  For some reason, Viktor feels like he’s referring to a lot more than just the free program.

“Yes,” he says.

* * *

 

Yuuri performs second to last, after Yurio and before Otabek, who’d skated a record-breaking short program and pulled into first.  Yuuri tenses up gradually as the performances flow by, points and places shifting.  He’s positively trembling by the time Yurio finishes skating a flawless routine.

“Don’t think about anything but the story, Yuuri,” he whispers again as they walk towards the ice.  Yuuri turns towards him when they reach the barrier, eyes gleaming with determination, fear, and the edge of something else.  “I’ve changed the routine a bit since you last saw it all the way through.  I worked hard on it yesterday.  It’s for you, now.  It’s all for you.”

He steps onto the ice.

The starting pose and the first few moves flow as Viktor remembers them, slow and electric, but then Yuuri takes off and, though the choreography remains largely the same, the look and feel of the performance has completely shifted, even since two days ago.  Viktor stares with an open mouth.  It almost seems like a duet, like he’s dancing with an invisible partner.  Or maybe that partner is the audience, which he sweeps away and engages so easily he should get points for that alone.  Distantly, Viktor recognizes his technique and form both are nearly flawless.  But that hardly matters at all.

He realizes maybe this _is_ a duet.  Maybe this was something Yuuri wanted to dance with him someday, like Stay Close to Me.  And now, Yuuri dances for both of them.

But he doesn’t understand.  Is this Yuuri’s goodbye?  Is it a thank you?  Is it just something he feels obligated to do because he feels bad for Viktor and his lost future?

Or has he been wrong about everything?

Yuuri’s last jump is a triple axel.  He hasn’t had any trouble with it lately, and Viktor feels himself relaxing, buoyant with joy and confusion.  The performance was incredible.  If this didn’t get him gold, nothing would.

Yuuri launches himself into the air.

Rotates one, two, three…

 _Four_.

His heart stops.  Implodes.  A black hole opens where his chest should be.  Time slows as Yuuri descends towards the ice.  He sees himself in that jump.  Flying.  Free.  Falling.  Exploding.  He hears himself scream Yuuri’s name as though the voice comes from someone else, faraway and disconnected.  Yakov’s hand closes around his arm, stopping him from dashing forward.

Yuuri lands.

Flawlessly.

Viktor’s heart stops.  He isn’t breathing.  Yuuri ends his program with a flourish, reaching out a hand as though beckoning someone, inviting a partner to join him on the ice.

“Oh my God,” Yakov says, "what was he thinking?"

Viktor isn’t listening.  He stumbles towards the break in the barrier, crutches forgotten.  He has to lean against it to stay upright, but he still holds out his arms to Yuuri.

Yuuri rushes towards him and stops an inch away from collision.  He stares at him.

“Yuuri,” he manages to say, and then Yuuri is on his knees in front of him.  White hot panic shoots through him, screams _Yuuri is hurt, please, no, not Yuuri too please_

But Yuuri doesn’t seem hurt.  He fumbles under his shirt and pulls out something threaded on a delicate chain.  He shoves it into Viktor’s hands and closes his own around them, pressing his forehead against their joined fingers.

“Viktor,” he pants, then raises himself a little on one knee to kiss the ring on Viktor’s finger.  “Viktor, please marry me.”

The roars of the crowd slowly seep in through his shell-shocked ears, as do the choking sounds coming out of Yakov behind him.  His brain moves too slow to understand.

“Yuuri,” he says, “your performance.”

“Was good, I know.  Are you listening to me?”  He stands, bringing their clasped hands up to his mouth.  “I want to marry you, Viktor Nikiforov, as soon as I possibly can.”

Slowly, Viktor unravels his fingers.  Clasped in his palm is a ring.  It’s skinnier, more delicate, than their gold ones, and seems to shine brighter.  It’s the color of starlight.  Inlaid in the metal is a tiny stone, glistening bright blue.  Etched on the inside is a character he doesn't know—命—and a word in Russian.  _люблю́_

Love.

“But—“ he asks, “How—when?”

“Phichit pulled some strings.  A lot of them.”

Phichit and Yuuri in the shop yesterday.  A jewelers.  The type of store hadn’t even registered at the time.  Things start to fall into place.

“You planned this?”

Yuuri grins at him and wipes at the dampness on his cheeks.  “Yeah.  Why do you think I was so anxious before the routine?  Now can you give me an answer, love?  We are standing in front of quite a few people.”

“Yuuri,” his voice comes out wet and stifled.  “Of course.  As soon as possible.”  He lets himself fall forward into Yuuri’s arms.

Yuuri beats his own and the world record for free skate by 7 points.

He wins Olympic gold.

* * *

That night, Viktor curls on the bed as Yuuri hums tunelessly in the bathroom.  He picks at his blanket and stares at the ring on his finger, nestled right above the gold.  They shine dim in the low light of the room.

“Why did you get me another ring?” he asks finally. 

Yuuri pokes his head out of the bathroom, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, damp hair stuck to his cheeks.  “I don’t know,” he says, muffled around the toothpaste bubbles.  “I guess I figured it would complete the gesture.  Plus I wanted the engravings.”

“I don’t have one for you,” Viktor says mournfully.

Yuuri rolls his eyes and disappears back into the bathroom.  Viktor hears him spit, and water running.  He wanders back out, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, and settles himself next to Viktor on the bed.  “I don’t need one.  We already have the rings.  This is just…more.”  He slides it off Viktor’s finger and points to the character-命.  “You know what this means?”

Viktor shakes his head. 

“Life,” Yuuri says.  “Life and love, right?  That’s our motto.”

Tears rise in his eyes yet again.  He drops his head into his hands.

“Love?” Yuuri asks.  A tentative hand settles on his shoulder.  “What is it?”

“You…you don’t have to, you know.”

“Have to what?”

“Stay.  Or marry me.”

Yuuri pulls back, alarm written on his features. “What are you talking about?”

“I know,” he swallows around the thick lump in his throat and wills the tears away.  “I know we were planning on this.  Have been planning on it.  But.  I mean, things have changed now.  No,” he holds up a hand to stave off Yuuri’s protests.  “It has.  You don’t have to feel obligated to go through with this.  I’m not what I was, I know.  You could do a lot better now.”

Yuuri’s eyes go from confused to hurt in an instant.  “You don’t…want to get married?”

“No! No, I mean, I do.  But I don’t want to just because you feel obliged thanks to previous agreements.”

Hurt flashes to anger.  “This is all because of your fucking knee, isn’t it?”

“No!  It’s just—I can’t be what you need anymore.”

“Tell me, Viktor, have I ever told you, to your face, what I _need_ you to be?”

Viktor tries to think.  “I—no?  But I need to be your coach.  I need to be a good skater.”

“Great.  You don’t remember.  Good thing I do.  It was almost two years ago now, at the beach back home.  You asked me what I wanted you to be, and rattled off a few possibilities including a father figure and a lover.  And I told you I just wanted you to be who you are.  Just Viktor.”

Viktor blinks at him.

Yuuri takes his chin and holds it in a firm grip.  “ _Just you_ , Viktor.  We’ve been over this before, right?  I don’t know what’s going on in your head, why you’ve suddenly convinced yourself you’re not good enough for me, or why you would think I would suddenly feel different about you just because you got hurt.  _I want you_.  Just you.”  He laughs and releases Viktor’s chin to rub at his own eyes.  “You know, I was so nervous before the competition because I was terrified you’d laugh at me and say I needed to win a few more gold medals first.”

“You never even had to win one, Yuuri.”

“Well, you sure made it seem like I did!”

“I would have married you that night of the banquet,” Viktor says truthfully.  “I would have married you in Barcelona.”

Yuuri stares at him.  “You never said anything.  I thought you wanted to wait.”

“I…thought you just didn’t want to anymore.  Because I’m not what you saw me as anymore.”

Yuuri sighs and laughs a little.  “We could improve our communication skills, I suppose.  But Viktor.  This is the last time I’m going to explain this to you, so listen, okay?  I was obsessed with the image of you for a long time.  The figure skating champion, Russia’s hero, whatever your public persona was.  But look, you haven’t been that guy since the day you showed up in my parent’s onsen naked.  Now you’re real, and so much more.  I love _you_ , not the champion from the posters.  I love that you have hundreds of videos of Makkachin on your phone that you scroll through whenever you’re separated for longer than a day.  I love that you leave half-full cups of coffee all over the place and don’t know how to use any of your kitchen appliances.  I love that you play video games with Yurio even though you don’t even know _how_ to play video games.  I love that you strip when you get drunk.  I love how you care about people even when you’re so dramatic and full of yourself and I love the sounds you make in bed and the way you look after I’ve fucked you and—well, I could go on.  But I’ll stop there.”  He's blushing.

“I—that was a lot of reasons.”

“I’ll write the rest into the wedding vows.  But do you believe me?  You could lose all your limbs and your speech and turn horribly ugly, and I’d still want to marry you.  I don’t care if you have a bum knee or your future’s uncertain.  Okay?”

Viktor wipes the snot off his face and smiles at Yuuri.  “Okay.”

“And,” Yuuri says, moving closer, “I never want to hear you say or vaguely suggest you’re not good enough for me ever again.  Got it?”

Viktor avoids his eyes.  Yuuri moves ever closer, and pushes him down onto the bed.  Hovering over him, he asks again, voice low and sultry now.  “ _Got it?_ ”

That Yuuri ever thought he couldn’t portray Eros is so laughable now.

Yuuri kisses him.  Every inch—soft on his eyelids and the edges of his lips, the sensitive spot behind his ear, sucking bruises down his neck and collarbones.  He shoves his shirt up to suck and bite at his nipples until Viktor groans, kisses down his stomach and hips.  His knee.  He pulls off Viktor’s underwear and peppers kisses up the inside of his thighs, and then he stops, hovering over him with a wicked smile.  Viktor moans at the sensation of his breath ghosting across his dick.  He moves a hand to tangle in Yuuri’s hair, but Yuuri grabs his arm and pushes it back down.

“Hands to yourself,” he says, “until you can say it.”

“What?” he breathes, already forgetting.

“Say, ‘I am in every way good enough to marry Katsuki Yuuri.’”

“Oh my God, Yuuri—“

“Say it, or I’ll roll over right now and go to sleep.”

“You wouldn’t—“

“ _Say it_.”

“I am in every way good enough to marry Katsuki Yuuri.”

Yuuri slides up his body to kiss him hard on the mouth.  “Good,” he whispers.  “You’re absolutely right.  And now I’m going to fuck you into oblivion until you actually believe it, got it?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, and tangles his hands in Yuuri’s hair as he swallows him down.  “Yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Yurio doesn't have a tragic backstory yet? Lemme give him half of one.
> 
> Hit me up on [tumblr](http://populus-tremuloides.tumblr.com) if you want I'm still crying about episode 12.
> 
> I DON'T KNOW RUSSIAN OR JAPANESE SRY EVERYTHING IS GOOGLE TRANSLATE


	3. Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi folks i'm not dead here's the last chapter.

The doorbell rings while he’s still in bed and he considers just letting it be and going back to sleep, but then it rings again, and again, and he drags himself up and limps to the door.  His knee twinges without the knee brace, but he shrugs off the pain as he shoulders the door open.

Yurio stands there, eyes wide, clutching a—what is that?  It takes Viktor a moment to process.  It’s a cat.  A rather small, wet-looking cat.  Yurio brushes past him into the flat before Viktor has the chance to comment.

“What are you doing with that?” he asks once he catches up to him in the kitchen.

“I found it at the rink,” he says.  “Out in the back, by the dumpsters.”

“Why were you out back by the dumpsters?”

Yurio gives him a look and deposits the wet bundle of cat on the kitchen table without an answer.  Viktor cringes.

“Don’t give me that look,” Yuri says.  “You let Makkachin eat off your good plates, you don’t have animal limits.”

“Why’d you bring it here?”

“My flat doesn’t allow for pets, Yakov won’t take it, and I’m not going to make Grandfather take care of it, especially because then it would be all the way in Moscow.  And it is a _he_.”

“You’re not suggesting—have you considered an animal shelter?”

Yurio speaks a firm and stubborn “No.”

“No what?  No shelter?”

“Your lease allows pets.”

“We already have Makkachin, I don’t think he would get on with a cat, Yurio—“

Yurio grins slyly.  “Yuuri was with me when I found him.  He said to bring it here.”

“I—well—“

Yurio’s grin turns triumphant.  He knows Yuuri is a trump card against Viktor.  The cat mewls pathetically and nudges at Yurio’s fingers.  It is rather…sweet.  Viktor can’t say he’s ever been a big cat person, but he likes to think he’s not heartless, either.

“Okay, I’ll just…talk to Yuuri about it when he gets home.  Should I give it some…what, milk or something?”

Yurio rolls his eyes.  “Milk isn’t good for cats, idiot.”  He pulls a sack out of his backpack.  “I bought some food on the way home.”  He proceeds to make better use of Viktor’s kitchen than Viktor usually does, cracking open a can and warming the contents in the microwave, mixing it with a little water and filling the space with a strong smell of salmon.  “Wet food isn’t great for younger cats, either, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt this once.  I’ll pick up some dry food tomorrow.”

Viktor sits heavily at the table.  The kitten edges towards him and cautiously sniffs at his fingers.  “How do you know all this?”

“Had some growing up,” he explains shortly, dropping the dish of food in front of the kitten.  It lunges at the food, licking at it eagerly. 

“How do you even know it’s a boy?  It needs vaccinations, Yuri, a checkup—“

“I’ll take it to the vet, too,” Yurio says, staring at him like a challenge.  “I’ll take care of it.  He just needs to stay here for now.”

Viktor sighs.

“Please, Viktor,” Yurio says, forcing out the words like they hurt him.

The cat is pretty cute, ash-grey with splotches of white, oversized ears, and huge, banjo-round eyes.  “If it doesn’t bother Makkachin,” he relents.  Yurio rewards him with a rare smile.  “Good.  Wanna play a video game?”

Viktor glances at the clock.  “Shouldn’t you get back to the rink?”

“Shouldn’t _you_ be out of bed before eleven?  Doing your job?”

“I have a physical therapy appointment later today.  What’s your excuse?”

Yurio shrugs and opens the fridge, riffling through the contents.  “I want to take him to the vet after he finishes eating.  Also, Yakov thinks I’ve been pushing myself too hard.”

“I agree with him.  If you’re not careful, you’ll injure yourself before Worlds.”

Yurio backs out of the fridge, a jar of pickles clutched in his hand and anger written on his features.  “I’m going to blow everyone’s asses out of the water at Worlds, so you better believe I’ll be practicing.”

“You know, just because you got bronze at the Olympics doesn’t really mean you need to work on anything in particular, or add something you didn’t have before.  Your skating was extraordinary, it’s just you and Yuuri and Otabek are all skating at such a high level right now--“

Yurio points at him with a pickle.  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay, okay.  I’m just saying it’s not a sin to take a rest day and if I were Yakov I’d force you to take more.  Yuuri takes plenty, as does Otabek, I’m sure.  Also, why do we have pickles?  Neither of us like them.”

“I went shopping with Yuuri after practice a few days ago; he bought them for me.”

“Are you planning on just moving in at some point?  We’ve got your pickles, a pile of your clothes in the spare bedroom, now your cat—“

Yurio rolls his eyes and disappears into the living room with his pickles.  “You playing or not?  And can you call the vet you use for Makkachin?”

Resigned, Viktor picks up his phone and follows him.  

* * *

 

“I’m home!” Yuuri calls out, tossing his keys onto the counter and dropping his bag by the front door.  He pokes his head into the living room.  Viktor’s sprawled on the couch, kitten perched on his chest, purring loudly.  Yurio’s curled in a chair, sleeping.

“Hey, love,” Yuuri says, dropping a kiss on his head.  “I see you two get along.  How was physical therapy?”

“I actually can’t move,” he groans.  It’s not that much of an exaggeration.  The therapist had worked him hard today, saying he should have regained more strength by now than he has.  His leg throbs painfully with his heartbeat, impervious to the painkillers he’d taken earlier.

“Sorry, love,” Yuuri says, scratching the kitten under the chin.  “What does Makkachin think of it?”

“My inability to walk or the cat?”

“The _cat_.”

“He’s hiding in the bedroom.”

“He’ll get used to it,” Yuuri says cheerfully.  “Lucky for you, I got takeout on the way home.”

“Curry?”

“Yes.  You’re welcome.”

“You’re perfect.”  He groans as he sits up, dislodging the kitten.

“I got extra for Yurio; I figured he’d still be here.  But let’s let him sleep for now.  He’s exhausting himself from practice.”  Yuuri extends a hand and helps Viktor to his feet.

“So,” he says, spooning butter chicken and saag paneer into two bowls.  “We need to talk.”

A bolt of panic shivers through his body.  “About what?”

Yuuri deposits a bowl in front of him.  “Don’t look like that.  Nothing bad, okay?”  He sits across from him and shovels a spoonful of chicken into his mouth.  “The season’s over in a few weeks.  I want to get married in April.”

“Oh—good.  But so soon?”

Yuuri spreads his hands.  “What is there to wait for?”

“Well, planning it all, for one—“

Yuuri shakes his head.  “I don’t want a big thing, Viktor, I just want to walk into some office and sign some papers, not some big deal that press could catch wind of and ruin—“

“It might be hard to do, here,” he says softly.  “Just…walk into an office and have it legally done.  Besides,” he says, trying to lighten the suddenly darker mood, “don’t you want your family there?  Minako?  Yurio?  Phichit?”

“I was thinking Phichit could be our witness,” Yuuri mumbles into his bowl.

“I want to go to Hasetsu,” he says.  Yuuri’s eyes widen.  “I want to get married at that beach and have a party at your parent’s inn.  It doesn’t have to be big or anything, but it’s important to me that we’re around family and have… _something_ to mark the occasion.  And it makes sense.  If we’re married there, I can have a green card to live and work there as much as we need; but no one can stop us from coming back here to coach or train if that’s what we decide.”

“Are you…Viktor, are you saying you’d revoke your citizenship?”

He shrugs, casually like the thoughts haven’t been keeping him up at night for weeks.  “I don’t know.  But I’m not competing anymore, it hardly matters what my passport says.  People wouldn’t even know.  But the fact is, it would be a lot less hassle to get married in Hasetsu, you’d be home, and I want to get married in the place where I fell in love with you.”

Yuuri turns bright red.  “That’s…incredibly sappy and also lovely.”

“Do you think your parents would mind?”

“I think they would be delighted and relieved.  They don’t want us to elope.”

“We’ll have to have a reception.  We need to invite skaters, probably coaches too, you know.  We can make sure it’s closed to the press, but the news will still get out…”

Yuuri groans.  “I don’t want to think about that.  I just want to think about being married to you.”

“You two are disgusting,” Yuri says, standing in the kitchen doorway rubbing his eyes.  “Are you really moving to Japan?  Away from St. Petersburg?”

Viktor whips his head around to stare at Yuri.  “Nothing’s decided yet.  We’ll just have to see what happens.”

Yurio stomps toward the table and pulls a plate towards himself.  “Well, if you’re moving back to Hasetsu, I’m coming with you.  You’re coaching me next season.” he pokes his fork at Viktor.  Viktor nearly drops his own.  “I—what? But you’re based here.  With Yakov.”

Yurio snorts and stabs his fork into a pile of rice.  “He’s been making noises about retiring.  You know he and Lilia are back together; he’s been whining about ‘enjoying his golden years’, which means having sex and drinking wine and other disgusting old man stuff.  He’s tired of dealing with you and Mila and Georgi and all the other drama queens he’s stuck coaching.”

“You forgot to include yourself in that list,” Yuuri says.  Yurio shoots him a glare.

“Look, you wanted to be a coach, right?  You need students beside your _boyfriend_ , right?”

“I was thinking—I might not be able to coach anyway,” Viktor says, stunned.

Yurio rolls his eyes and stands, grabbing his plate.  “Shut up.  I can’t stand your existential bullshit right now.  You’re my new coach.  Congratulations.  I’m gonna go watch Iron Chef.”

“He’s right, you know,” Yuuri murmurs after he leaves the room.  “You do need more people to coach.  And there’s no way in hell either of us are going to let you quit that before you even try.”

“I can’t imagine Yurio letting me coach him,” Viktor says slowly.  It’s Yuuri’s turn to roll his eyes.  “You’ve been coaching him for the last year, Viktor, and he’s listened to almost every word.  And improved greatly for it.  Could you have a little faith in yourself, please?”

That’s rich, coming from Yuuri, but Viktor still feels ashamed.  He drops his eyes back to his bowl.  “I just want to marry you in Hasetsu.  I’ll go from there.”

Yuuri reaches out and entwines their fingers.  “Well, I think we can make that much happen, at least.” 

* * *

 

Yuuri bombs Worlds, meaning he gets bronze.  Yurio, unsurprisingly, snatches gold. He seems curiously unaffected by the loss, which surprises Viktor until the night after the exhibition, when Yuuri whispers to him while entwined in bed, “I don’t care about anything but marrying you right now.  After that, I’ll think about skating again.”

“What if I refuse to marry you now?” he asks.

“You won’t,” Yuuri replies, and kisses him so long and fierce he feels dizzy. 

They’ve picked an arbitrary date in April, when most of their friends will still be free before diving into training for the next season.  Yuuri seems entirely unconcerned with planning for it—he wants to go to city hall and get it done, because “it’s just easier that way, you won the argument about going to Hasetsu so just let me have the actual thing without a ton of people staring at me”, then have a party on the beach if it’s nice enough, in the onsen if not.  “We can just set up food tables and that’s all we’ll need,” he keeps saying to Viktor’s worried questions.  “My parents can cook.  Think of how nice it’ll be, there by the sea?”

For someone with such intense anxiety problems, he seems remarkably calm about it all while fear and uncertainty flutter nearly constantly in Viktor’s chest.  A part of him still can’t believe they’re actually going through with it, that in less than a month they’ll be married, that the rings on their fingers will finally mean something solid, something set in law, something lasting.  Meanwhile, Yuuri worries over other things—Yurio’s cat, news of the wedding getting out to the press, whether or not Viktor is following through with his physical therapy requirements.

“Have you been slacking on PT?” he asks him one day when he comes home to find Viktor slumped on the couch, staring at a blank TV screen with Makkachin on one side and the cat on the other.  “You don’t seem very motivated.”

He doesn’t answer.  Yuuri sighs.  “What is it?  Do you not want to get back on the ice? They said that if you did what you should be doing you could get back to things by late April, early May. Do you not want to do that?”

He shakes his head.  He hasn’t been slacking yet, but it gets more difficult to force himself there every day, even with the enticing promise of recovery.  The pain gets both better and worse—no longer sharp during the exercises themselves, bringing tears of pain to his eyes, but emerging later, after the sessions, dull and constant, keeping him awake at night.

“I’m just distracted,” he mutters.  It’s not a lie, but not the whole truth.  The thought of stepping on the ice again terrifies him, creeping into his dreams, quietly choking him whenever he goes near a rink.

The night before they leave for Japan, he goes to the training center late, just him and the cleaning crews, and stares at the smooth expanse of ice, glistening in the light from the picture windows. Perfectly smooth, no hint of skate marks, ready for the athletes in the morning.  His feet itch with longing.  He’s tempted, for a moment, to get his spare skates from the locker downstairs, and step onto it, just to see.  But something holds him back, something about the chill emanating from the ice, how smooth and treacherous, how falsely inviting and pure.  Staring at it, he can scarcely believe he used to move across it so effortlessly.  The pop of his knee echoes in his ears, a memory he can’t seem to get out of his head.  His knee throbs, a ghostly, remembered pain.  In the end, he sits back against the barrier and lets his fingers trail over the ice until his phone rings, Yuuri’s voice ringing alarmed and loud in his ear.  He lies to him, saying he’s with Yakov, and trails his way home through empty side streets, still stained with crusty snow where the sun doesn't reach.

He has a reoccurring dream now.  It comes to him unfailingly, every time he closes his eyes, sometimes crisp and fully realized, sometimes nothing but a hazy suggestion.  He flies with Yuuri on the ice at the training center, a reenactment of Yuuri's free program, fully realized as a duet.  The gratefulness he feels to be back on the ice almost chokes him, the joy in Yuuri’s eyes as he smiles at him.  And then he’s no longer on the ice, and Yuuri dances with someone else.  Phichit, Yurio, Chris, JJ, Mila, and finally alone, spinning for an impossibly long time, a blur of black against the white.  The dream chases him to Japan, persisting even on this spring-soaked coast, the scent of cherry blossoms heavy on the air.  Even as he wakes in Yuuri’s bed, wrapped in his arms, he consistently wakes fearing he's lost him.

Two nights before the wedding, he wakes from the dream with a start.  He sits up and stares at Yuuri for a moment, cuddled against Makkachin, then slips out of bed.

He knows the path to Ice Castle Hasetsu by heart, his feet following it naturally.  The memories of biking, walking, and running there all through that warm spring, summer and fall of training fill his mind as he retraces the way on unsteady legs.  Rain pours down, soaking him—Yuuri’s anxiety finally reared its head after three straight days of rain that tore the cherry blossoms from the trees and put the beachside reception in jeopardy—and his knee is stiff from the workout he’d given it earlier that day.  The glow from the streetlamps shimmer on the wet pavement as he crosses the bridge, the distinctive silhouette of Hasetsu Castle nearly indistinguishable against the dark, cloudy sky. 

He lets himself in with Yuuri’s keys, staring at the empty expanse of ice.  Unlike in St. Petersburg, this ice looks dull, no glimmer or hint of promise.  It’s probably because of the weather, but Viktor can’t help but feel his bad must be projecting itself onto the rink. 

He throws off his soaked coat and tries to wring out his sodden hair, shuddering with cold.  Usually, the ice isn’t terribly cold but coming in from a frigid rain it might as well be Antarctica.

He backtracks out to the front counter and grabs a pair of scuffed rental skates, lacing them determinedly with trembling fingers.

He steps onto the ice, holding the barrier with a death-grip.  His bad knee trembles beneath him, not with weakness, but fear.

He’s Viktor Nikiforov.  Five time world champion.  He _will_ skate.

He pushes himself away from the barrier.

For a few minutes, it’s blissful.  He glides gently around the rink, regaining the familiarity of the ice, executing a few lazy spins to reestablish his balance, careful to bear most weight only on his reliable leg.  He tries a camel spin and laughs a little at the feeling of wind in his hair.  He closes his eyes.

He knows better than to attempt a full jump, but he does push it a bit and tries to jump into another camel spin.  His landing foot—the good leg—slips out from under him and he falls, catching himself on his hands and knees.

The bad knee complains at the abuse, but most of his weight falls onto the other knee, the good one, and the crack of it as it hits the ice freezes him in his crouched position.  His knee throbs painfully.  Panic crashes through him.

If he ruins that knee, he’ll have two bum knees.  If he has two bum knees he _really_ won’t skate again, not even to coach.

Yuuri would kill him if he knew he’d come to the rink alone.  So would Yakov, and Yurio, and Mila, and all the others who had offered to accompany him and help him when he wanted to go back, who he’d refused.  They’d all kill him, and he wouldn’t blame them one bit.  At this point, he deserves it.

He slumps sideways and gingerly stretches his leg out.  His knee hurts, but it isn’t the blinding pain of his previous experience.  It bends fine.  He shoves up he leg of his pants to see purple bruising already blooming.  But—he tests it again, bending—it moves.  It moves.

He’s fine.  It’s fine, it’s fine, he’s fine.

It takes him a moment to realize he’s repeating this mantra out loud, a harsh whisper that’s slowly getting louder.  “It’s fine, it’s fine.”  He can’t seem to stop.

And then he’s lying on his side on the ice, knee clutched to his chest as though keeping it close to his core will protect it from ever being injured again, and he thinks he might be crying because his cheeks are wet and noises echo around the rink, but he can’t really tell.  He feels half removed from himself, as though he’s hovering above, looking down at his own body as he falls apart.

He can’t seem to breathe right.  He’s sucking air in, but there isn’t enough.  The ice against his cheek radiates cold through his body, down the side of his neck to his core.  He wonders idly if the sheen of rainwater still covering him is turning to ice, if he’ll freezes to the rink and just become part of it.  That doesn’t sound like such a bad thought.  To just become ice.

Now he’s aware he’s crying.  He still doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t really want to be, but he can’t make himself stop, so he tucks his head over his knee and cries harder, not registering the sound of a door slamming or other echoing voices intermingling with the sound of his sobs.  Footsteps echo, and then someone is touching his shoulder.  He turns his face up and tries to quiet himself.

“Viktor?  Are you okay?”  Yuuri looks pale, glasses crooked, hair a rat’s nest.  “What happened?”

He tries to answer but can’t speak.  More footsteps, and Yurio and Phichit’s heads poke up behind Yuuri.

“Viktor, what the fuck?” Yurio growls at him.  He just gasps in response.

“ _Viktor_ ,” Yuuri says, shaking his shoulder hard enough for his head to slam against the ice.  “ _Are you hurt_?”  He’s practically yelling, voice angry and cold.

“I—I—“ he tries to gasp, then gives up and shakes his head, lifting a hand to clutch at his throat.

Yuuri wilts, relief in his eyes.  “Okay.  Okay.  Look, I think you’re having a panic attack.  Lucky for you, I’m an expert with this.  Can you try to sit up?”

He shakes his head.  He can’t do anything.  He can’t breathe.  He closes his eyes.

“Okay, Phichit, come here and help me sit him up,” he hears Yuuri instruct, and feels a pressure behind him, lifting him to lean against Yuuri, warm and solid.  He chokes and coughs, twisting his hands into Yuuri’s shirt.  “Just try to breathe,” Yuuri whispers in his ear, rubbing his back up and down.  “Follow my breathing.”

“I’m trying,” he coughs out.  “Help.”

“I’m trying,” Yuuri says back.  “Everything’s okay.  Just breathe.”

“You’re mad,” he breathes out.  His heaving gasps have started to settle.

“I’m not,” Yuuri counters.  “I’m worried.”

He gasps in air and turns his face into Yuuri’s neck.  He can breathe again, but he still can’t seem to stop crying.  Yuuri’s hand buries itself in his hair.  “Can you tell me what happened?  Did you fall?”

He nods against Yuuri’s neck.  “I thought I’d hurt my other knee.”

Hands slide his pant leg up roughly and press on the tender bruise.  He winces. “You idiot,” Yurio hisses.  “Why’d you come alone?”

Yuuri pulls away to look him in the eyes, raising an eyebrow to echo the question.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he mumbles.  “I just ended up here.  I thought I’d try the ice.”

“You’re not cleared for it yet.” Yurio states the obvious.  “For obviously good reason.”

Yuuri just sighs and kisses him on the side of the head.  “Can you get up now?”

He nods slowly.

“Then let’s get home.” 

* * *

 

Yuuri doesn’t speak of it the next morning, just inspects both of Viktor’s knees carefully and silently before leaving the bedroom.  He doesn’t say a single word the entire time.  Viktor can’t tell if he’s angry, frustrated, or worried—or something in between all three.  He leaves the onsen quickly, skipping breakfast, and makes his way down to the water.  He sits on a damp piece of driftwood away from the public beach and watches the waves crash in.  The sun slants out between strips of heavy cloud, lighting the water, strips of sparkling blue standing out from the slate grey.  The clouds spit rain.  Once again, he’s forgotten his rain jacket.  He still feels damp from last night.

After awhile—he can’t seem to measure the time, the sun’s disappeared entirely behind a thick cloud and hasn’t yet reappeared—he hears a dog barking.  Makkachin bounds between trees and through the shallow water the tide has brought in, depositing himself in front of Viktor, tongue hanging out and tail wagging.  Yuuri follows not far behind, hopping between rocks as he trys to keep his feet dry.  He sits beside Viktor, again without speaking.  Viktor reaches out to rub Makkachin’s ears.

“He tracked you here,” Yuuri says eventually. 

He doesn’t know what to say in response.  He continues scratching Makkachin’s ears.  The dog slumps forward to rest his head on Viktor’s knee.

Eventually Yuuri sighs and rubs at his eyes tiredly, pushing his glasses to the top of his head.  “Do you want to go back to the ice?  To coach?”

Viktor practically chokes on his own spit.  “Of course I do!”

“What happened last night?”

He can’t bring himself to look Yuuri in the eye.  “I’ve been having dreams.  About skating again.  I’ll be skating with you and I’ll be so happy, but then I’ll fall or something again and I’ll be stuck on the sidelines with no legs at all, watching you skate with someone else.  I keep waking up from them and not being able to fall back asleep.  So last night I just went to the rink. To see.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He lifts his head.  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I wanted to help you, Viktor.  If you wanted to go to the rink, I would have gone with you.  I would have helped you skate.”

“I shouldn’t need help skating, Yuuri, that’s the thing.  I shouldn’t have fallen like I did.  None of this should be happening.”

Yuuri sighs deeply again.  Viktor wonders if someday he’ll run out of air in his lungs from all the sighing he’s been doing lately.

“Do you want to do this?” Yuuri asks finally, staring out across the water.  His glasses are still perched on top of his head, strands of his hair tangled around them.  He licks his lips slightly and Viktor notices they’re a bit chapped.  It makes his want to kiss him, but Yuuri seems closed off somehow.  Like he doesn’t want to be touched, or kissed.

“Do what?” he finally responds.

“Get married, Viktor.  Tomorrow.”

He opens his mouth to answer and can’t find any words.  He closes it.  Opens it again.  Pets Makkachin.  Yuuri waits, silent, staring at the sea.

“Why would you ask that?” he whispers eventually. 

“You’re not doing well,” Yuuri says bluntly.  “I don’t want you to feel pressured into this if you’d rather wait until you’ve gotten over this other hurdle.”

“It’s not a hurdle,” he says, bewildered.  “I mean, the leg—yes, but not—not marrying you.”

Yuuri looks at him, eyes naked without his glasses.  “Are you sure?”

He turns his body towards Yuuri, unseating Makkachin who whines and rearranges himself to lay over Viktor’s feet.  “Yuuri, I’ve wanted this forever.  You know that, I couldn’t—I couldn’t handle it if we _didn’t_.”

“It’s always been me asking,” Yuuri says softly.  He won’t meet Viktor’s eyes.  “I gave the rings the first time and proposed the second time.  Maybe I’ve been too pushy.”

He’s speechless again for a moment.  “Yuuri…Yuuri, how many times have I expressed my excitement to you since February?”

“A few times,” Yuuri mumbles.

“More than a few!  Yuuri…I wanted to get married here.  I’m choosing to do this here so I can be with you, no matter what that means for life back in Russia.” He reaches over to clutch at Yuuri’s hand, running his fingers over the cool band of the ring.  “Please don’t…please don’t say you don’t want to.”

“Of course I want to,” Yuuri says.  “But I want you to be better, too.  And I want it to be something you want as much as I do.  I don’t want you saddled with me if you’re even feeling an ounce of uncertainty.”

“I’m not,” he says.  “Yuuri, I’m not.”  Yuuri keeps his eyes on the waves.

“Look,” he says, scrabbling in the pocket of his jacket for the box that’s been tucked there since they flew in from St. Petersburg.  “I was going to give this to you at the ceremony itself.  But here, you should have it now, just so you know.”

The box is slightly damp from the downpours it has endured, and he couldn’t find an actual ring box to put it in so it’s been sliding around in a cardboard earring box he stole from Mila’s dresser, but Yuuri still looks at him in awe when he takes it.  “What is it?” he asks, like it isn’t obvious.

“Just open it,” he says.

Yuuri takes the lid off and digs the ring out of the cotton padding in the box.  He holds it in front of his eyes, squinting to see.

“Put your glasses on, Yuuri.”  He slides them down for him and Yuuri’s hair flops back into his eyes.  They widen when they see the ring.

It’s a little ostentatious and its history of being stuck in a dresser drawer for the last fifteen years evident, but it’s still beautiful, Viktor thinks.  A thin gold band, intricately filigreed with a tiny diamond set in the top.  The gold is tarnished, but the diamond still sparkles in the watery light seeping through the clouds. 

“Viktor,” Yuuri breathes.  “This is beautiful.  How did you—where?”

“It was my grandmother’s,” he says.  “It was the only thing I got from her after she died.  She practically raised me, you know.  Got me started skating and everything.”  He clears his throat, voice suddenly rough.  “I was going to get you something new, but I thought of this and…I wanted you to have it.  It should fit.  I had it altered to your finger size.”

Yuuri slips it on and holds his hand out in front of him.  It fits right above the other gold ring.  The diamond glints as the sun finally breaks through the cloud layer and sweeps over their log and the sea in front of them.

“Yuuri, please marry me,” Viktor says.  He might be crying a little bit.  He’s not quite sure.  “I’m not okay. I don't know what will happen, if I can skate, if I can coach. But I'll be okay eventually.  I promise.”

Yuuri turns to him and nearly knocks him off the log with the force of his kiss.  He pulls back and smiles.  “Yeah.  I’ll marry you still.”

“You know,” he says, breathless from the kiss.  “This is funny.  A few months ago I was the one begging you to take a way out if you didn’t actually want to get married.  So you wouldn’t get saddled with me.”

Yuuri laughs.  “Maybe this is just what we’re going to be.  Constantly unconvinced that we deserve each other.  But I _know_ I’m getting the better end of the deal.”

Viktor shakes his head and leans his forehead against Yuuri’s.  “No.  Me.”

Yuuri snorts and Viktor leans in and kisses him before the sound ends, chapped lips catching against his, tasting the faint fishy aftertaste of whatever Yuuri ate for breakfast.  Yuuri breaks away again—too soon.  “The rain tore all the cherry blossoms off,” he says.  “It won’t be as pretty.  We might not be able to use the beach.”

Viktor shakes his head.  A feeling swells in his chest that he can’t quite explain—something between confidence and perfect contentment.  “It won’t rain tomorrow.  I know it won’t.”

* * *

It doesn’t.  They wake to a golden sunrise over the sea and submit their paperwork at the city hall, with just Phichit, Yurio, and Yuuri’s parents and sister.  Everyone cries, except for Mari and Yurio who just glare and wipe at their eyes when they think nobody is looking.  Then they go down to the water where someone’s set up a pavilion and some tables piled with food and someone else has cut entire branches of cherry blossoms and stuck them in vases at random amongst the platters.  Paper lanterns hang around the perimeter of the pavilion to light when the sun goes down and a few random guests from the onsen have invited themselves to the party and are already drinking down sake at a table in the corner.  It’s perfect—the absolute opposite of what Viktor imagined his wedding might look like years ago, and exactly what he didn’t know he wanted.

After the food and congratulations, after Yuuri’s mother brings out beautiful tea cakes, the kind that he’s eaten at every Russian wedding he’s ever been to, after Yakov surreptitiously wipes tears out of his eyes and has to leave early before he lets Viktor see any other emotions slip through, after he catches Mila kissing Sara in the shadows behind the pavilion, after Yurio makes a sulky wedding toast and Phichit makes a far more enthusiastic one, after all that he finds himself sitting at one of the tables, exhausted, staring at the glass of champagne in his hand.  He’s been hugged and kissed today by everyone important in his life.  Yuuri’s mother cried over him like he was own.  He notices Yakov, back from his self-imposed exile, downing a shot of vodka and practically hanging off of Lilia’s neck.  Yurio stands with his arms crossed glaring at his back as Otabek attempts to engage him in conversation to distract him.  There’s a strange feeling in his chest, something he’s felt since meeting Yuuri, that seems expanded near to bursting tonight.  He feels like he might cry.  Again.

Yuuri slides into the seat next to him and takes the hand that isn’t holding the champagne glass.  “You okay?”

He nods and clears his throat.  “I just…can’t believe we finally did it.”

Yuuri looks at him closely, staring into his eyes like he’s reading his soul.  “Are you happy?”

He nods, not trusting himself to speak.

Yuuri smiles slightly, the light from the lanterns illuminating his cheekbones and the curve of his nose.  His hair flops into his eyes.  He reaches over and pulls Viktor’s glass from his hand, setting it on the table and standing up, pulling Viktor up with him.

“Come on,” he says.

“Where are we going?”

Yuuri just smiles and whistles for Makkachin.  The dog bounds over from where Phichit and Guang Hong are surreptitiously feeding him pieces of yakitori and leads them away from the pavilion.  They walk along the beach, Makkachin running ahead and back to them like he’s afraid they’re not following.  The tide creeps up the beach, crashing close to their shoes, mixing the scent of salt water in with the perfume of cherry blossoms.  They climb up to the street and cross the bridge.  The silhouette of the castle stands clear against the moonlit sky.

“Why are we here, Yuuri?” he asks.

“I want to show you something.”  Yuuri pulls him into the building, hand held tight.  The lights are all off, the rink illuminated only by the moonlight filtering in through the windows.  Just like it was a few nights ago, but this time the ice gleams white and shining.  Even indoors it smells like cherry blossoms.

Yuuri puts on skates.  Viktor sits on a bench and watches him, the familiar movements made extraordinary by the fact that this man, this living, breathing miracle, just married him.  He feels full to the brim.  Makkachin curls up next to the bench, watching them both.

Then, suddenly, Yuuri is in front of him, holding a pair of skates and tugging at his fancy dress shoes.  The breath falls right out of his body.

“Yuuri?  No, wait.  I can’t.  Last time—”

Yuuri kisses him.  His foot.  The toes.  He kisses his ankles.  His shin.  His treacherous, useless knee.  Up and up, until he frames Viktor’s face in his hands and locks him into his warm brown gaze.

“Viktor,” he says.  “Vitya.  Trust me.”

And Viktor does.  He trusts Yuuri with his life.  It’s why he’s here, at this small town rink in this small piece of nowhere in Japan.  It’s why he has friends and a new family and a two rings on his finger.  It’s why every moment on the ice he’s had since they met felt more like flying than ever before.  It’s why he sits at this moonlight rink, the scent of cherry blossoms in his nose and dog hair on his fancy trousers.

If he hadn’t been putting all his trust in Yuuri Katsuki for the last two and a half years of his life, he would have fifty gold medals and an empty, echoing apartment.  He would have endless ambition and nowhere left to go.  He would not have a home.

He would not have Yuuri.

Yuuri finishes tying on his skates and helps him up.  He steps onto the ice and glides in a small, slow circle, eyes closed, moonlight casting shadows on his face.  The chrysanthemum in his buttonhole is wilting, his glasses are crooked, and he smells faintly of katsudon and champagne. 

Viktor’s never seen anyone so amazing in his life.

Yuuri comes to a halt and smiles.  He holds out a hand.

Viktor steps onto the ice.

 

 

_Lo, I am with you always,                                                                                                                                                                                                                         you promised that,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  and when I realized it was true,                                                                                                                                                                                                                 my soul flared up._

_—Rumi_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for bearing with me for this two and a half month gap. I hope the ending is satisfactory. 
> 
> Shout out to Rumi for 800 year old poetry that still makes me cry.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who had advice and corrections about figure skating, language, and culture. I appreciate any corrections you might see!
> 
> p.s. sorry if yuuri is out of character i tried
> 
> p.p.s. yeah i know same sex marriage isn't legal in Japan yet either i'm just dreaming of a kinder world
> 
> p.p.p.s. why is the entire first scene pointless to the story as a whole? Why can Yurio not have a cat at his apartment when he clearly does in canon? Idk I just really wanted Viktor to have this cat:   
> hell yeah


End file.
